Disclaimer: Nothing's mine but the plot.
A/N: After much consideration, I've decided to
change the plot. The way everything was turning out
just wasn't working. This is essentially chapters 11 and 12
combined into one with several changes.
Chapter 11: A Whole New World
Part I: Try Try Again
February 2, 2013 4 am, USS Voyager, Dark side of the Moon
Cameron stood next to a stasis chamber, staring down at the body lying in it.
Once Jim's heart had quit beating, nothing they tried would make it beat again. There had been too much damage to do anything except to immediately put his body into stasis.
The one positive thing that came out of this was the discovery of Voyager, and thus giving John Henry a means to escape his dying body.
She let out a sigh as a tear of relief flowed down her newly regenerated face. She would have been alone if it hadn't.
Cameron pushed a button and the stasis chamber slid into the wall and sealed. She still found it hard to believe that a human had sacrificed themselves to save them.
She knew he had moved her away from the stuck blast doors, saving her from catastrophic damage. He had willfully stayed behind to make sure she'd be safe.
He had even tried to help John Henry.
Cameron knew that Jim had considered both family, and he hadn't wanted to lose another.
Just like John, willing to risk it all for those he cared about, it was one of the many reasons why she loved John Connor so much.
It was the main reason she cared about Jim at all.
To Cameron, selflessness was the best quality humanity had to offer.
Thinking of John put her in an even more depressed mood considering the monumental failure of the UDE.
She was broken out of her depressed thoughts by her chirping combadge. She quickly tapped it and answered the hail.
"Yes John Henry"? She asked as she wiped away the tear.
"I finished critical repairs and brought the main sensors back online. The other object that came through is in a rapidly decaying orbit around Earth, but I can't identify it's origin. What I do know is it didn't come from ours or the Star Trek universe".
"Can you beam it on board"?
"No, the distance is too great, we will have to break orbit and get closer to Earth".
"Are we capable of doing so"?
"Yes, I have managed to fully repair the sublight propulsion systems, but the specifications for the Quantum Slipstream core are encrypted with an adaptive fractal encryption code".
"Wise decision on their part, from what we know about it it's not something you want your enemy to have".
"I have managed to repaired all the hull breaches and restore full structural integrity".
"Good, lets get this other object, but John Henry"?
"Yes"?
"Make sure it's safe to bring aboard, and beam your endoskeleton from bunker, it needs repaired".
With that she tapped her badge and ended the conversation.
Voyager had a lot of damage, but lucky for them not too badly or the ship would have crashed.
When Voyager had been refitted they had installed independently powered holographic projectors throughout the entire ship. This allowed John Henry to repair the ships systems while his body was still on Earth.
She dimmed the sickbay lights and left for the mess hall, once there she simply ordered a silver colored supplement that John Henry had formulated that would allow the nanites in her body to continue repairs on her sheath.
As she felt the impulse engines engage, Cameron left the mess hall and left for engineering. Cameron knew John Henry's avatar would be down there working.
She really hoped that he would be able to improve the UDE quickly, mainly because she didn't know how much longer she could be away from John without losing her sanity.
She got in the turbolift and told the computer to take her to deck 11. Moments later she walked into engineering for the first time, making visual comparisons to those from the show.
And there were quite a few due to the refit.
After she mapped out the differences, she sought out John Henry, who's hologram was standing at an engineering station. She walked over to him as he turned his head to acknowledge her presence.
"Hello Cameron, how are you feeling"? He asked with concern in his voice.
"I've been better". She said evenly as she made her way over to a console.
"We both have". Cameron chose not to answer him, but instead chose to change the topic to something less... distracting.
"What's your report on the object"? Cameron said as she began looking at data on the screens.
"The sensors indicate that it's some sort of data storage device made of a replicated material similar to duratanium poly-alloy".
"It must store a lot of information to be as big as it is". She said as she looked away from the screen and back at John Henry.
"It's one meter in diameter and four meters tall, we'll have to put it in cargo bay 2". John Henry said as he activated a tractor beam. "Since we don't know much about it, I don't want to risk using the transporter".
Cameron nodded in agreement as she assisted John Henry as he guided the black cylinder into the empty cargo bay.
Once that had been done they closed the door and left Earth's orbit for the moon. Cameron entered the cargo bay and quickly saw that John Henry hadn't wasted any time. He had already begun making various devices and cables from the spare industrial replicator in the room.
From what she knew about the starship, this area should have been Seven of Nine's 'room', but all the Borg technology had been removed, and in it's place were a few crates of spare parts and the replicator.
Now the large alien backup device was lying on the floor. It was black with various circular and rectangular ports on the bottom and top ends of the device. Throughout the device were digital veins, dark due to the lack of power, but Cameron guessed that they were to cool it, just like on her body.
"What have you learned about it"? She asked John Henry as he picked up a newly formed plasma extension cord off the replicator, she noticed that the head was meant to fit the device.
"My scans from the tricorder indicate that it runs on a form of photonic energy, but what kind I'm not sure. There is a secondary power coupling just below the main one, and I found traces of plasma that seem to come from a typical deuterium fusion reactor".
"Which makes it compatible with the our systems". Cameron concluded as John Henry plugged in one end into the device and locked it into place.
"Yes, but I'm going to hook it up to a power cell for now to keep it isolated".
Cameron nodded and picked up the 3 foot tall power cell next to her and placed it next to the cargo bay computer console. John Henry wirelessly connected to the cell so he could control it's power output mentally. He then told Cameron to connect the other end, a standard Federation connector, into the cell.
After she did that John Henry turned on the power flow at the lowest power setting. Meanwhile Cameron monitored the device for changes since he needed to find the proper phase and frequency that it needed. He assumed that it had a protection device in place to prevent any power discrepancies from entering the delicate data core.
And he was right, it did, and after three minutes or so of trying different combinations, the device opened up and let power in.
"I'm reading power flowing into the photon converter, but it needs more power". Cameron said as she tapped a few buttons on the tricorder. (John Henry had given her the manual to one over a sick bay monitor and she learned all of it's functions in twenty minutes)
John Henry cranked the juice slowly until it began spewing plasma out of an overload protection port.
"It's stable now, the device is online, but I'm not reading much activity in the core. I think this device is like a hard drive, no significant processing power, just storage".
"I concur, we need to be able to see the device contains. It may hold data that may help me understand inter-dimensional travel better".
"It could". Cameron said as she continued to fine tune her scans. The data in there seemed to stored as frozen light. When she told John Henry her findings he said it could be a highly advanced version of a tech cube that was used to store large holographic programs.
"What we need to do now is try to figure out how to access and interpret the data inside".
"I agree, I have been able to identify the primary optical data port on the top side of the device". Cameron pointed to one of the square shaped glowing ports. The whole device now glowed an eerie shade of orange, despite the incoming plasma being blue.
"It may take me awhile to understand how the device works, for now I'm going to use Voyager's database to see if they've ever encountered anything similar". John Henry said as he began taking more scans with the tricorder.
"Do you need me to do anything else"? She asked with her head slightly tilted.
"You need to understand how this ship works. I have left a large data file open in engineering to read".
"Thank you". She said as the cargo bay doors opened and walked out.
When Cameron arrived back in engineering a few minutes later, she sat down at the only active terminal.
The data file was there and she opened it. She began absorbing theories and laws and new forms of math she'd never seen. After she'd absorbed the necessary knowledge to understand Federation level science, she began going over Voyager's systems and specifications.
The ship was 343 meters in length, 133 meters wide, and 66 meters wide with 15 decks.
The ship had been launched in 2371, and then refitted in late 2380 with shakedown tests lasting until early 2381.
All systems had been upgraded with new experimental technology, some of it developed on the ship while it had been lost in the Delta quadrant. Others had been developed by Starfleet during the Dominion War.
Voyager had a new main power source called a Quantum core, it put out significantly more power than a warp core of the same size. The class 9 warp drive fitted originally to Voyager could put out the same average power as the Galaxy class needed, about 12.75 million TeraWatts. The designed maximum output of the original core was 1 billion TeraWatts to give the ship a max cruise speed of warp 9.975 velocity or absolute maximum warp speed 9.985 for one hour while maintaining all ship systems. The new Quantum core could put out twice as much average power, 26 million TeraWatts, while achieving 97% thermal efficiency. The new maximum had been pushed all the way up 2.5 billion TeraWatts.
This allowed more powerful weapons and shielding to be installed along with the new slipstream drive.
Voyager's original phaser arrays had been Type VIII. The total output of the 13 Type VIII array was capable of 10,000 TeraWatts, or 769 TeraWatts per array. Now the ship had been fitted with the new Type XIII array developed just after the end of the Dominion War.
The Type XII were standard on the powerful Sovereign class, each of their arrays capable of just over 7 PetaWatts or 7,000 TeraWatts. The Type XIII were for station defense only, but with Voyager's output it became feasible to fit these powerful weapons onto the ship. Each array was capable of 10 PetaWatts of output, or for the whole system, 130 PetaWatts.
That was ton of firepower for such a small ship, making it a heavy rival to the Defiant class warship.
The ship was also fitted with photon, quantum, and transphasic torpedoes. Each type VI photon had a maximum yield of 200 isotons, or in our units 496 megatons, quantum torpedoes were rated 178 megatons, but were far more effective at penetrating shields which made them better against enemies like the Borg.
The best of the bunch were the transphasic torpedoes, these could not be stopped by any known shielding system, the Borg included. Each one was capable of taking out a 3000 cubic meter Borg cube. The transphasic torpedoes now on Voyager each with a yield of 525 isotons or 1302 megatons, while not the most powerful torpedo the Federation could produce, it was the most effective.
The ship still had it's original capacity of 38 torpedoes, 15 photon, 13 quantum, and 10 of the powerful transphasic torpedoes. However, Starfleet engineers improved B'elanna's torpedo production line and left it on board just in case more were to be needed.
Voyager's shields were revamped too. They had incorporated the regenerative shielding to complement the now standard multiphasic and metaphasic shielding that protect against subspace radiation and extreme thermal environments.
Overall the shield improvements made them ten times more powerful than they originally were, bringing the total capacity upto 7.29 million TeraJoules.
To cope with the stresses of slipstream flight, the ship had been refitted with a high level structural integrity fields instead of a standard one.
One last bonus, the ablative hull armor generators had been slightly improved to make them more resistant against the Borg before being reinstalled. The armor was now 1.5 meters thick instead of one.
Cameron continued through the tech manual for the next several hours, learning all she could about the ship. It was disappointing to her that the full design specs on the Quantum core were encrypted.
Meanwhile John Henry was having a not so fun time trying to decipher how this optical port worked. It was considerably more advanced than anything on Voyager, but not more advanced than some of the species that the Federation had encountered, though that number was very small.
However, that didn't mean that whoever made this device wasn't more advanced in other ways. Many of the civilizations the Federation encountered were like that, more advanced in some ways, but more primitive in others. He was betting that whoever created this device was in the 'more advanced than' category in comparison to the Federation.
Despite the technological gaps, John Henry, coupled with Voyager's databases and one of new model tricorders, was able to finally figure out how to make an appropriate adapter. It had taken about three hours, a small eternity of him, to figure out how to adapt the technology to be compatible with Voyager's secondary optical data system.
Then it took only twenty minutes or so replicating the various parts needed for the conversion, but putting it all together took another hour of assembly and subsequent scans making sure everything was within spec. After adjusting a few things here and there he was finally ready to probe the device's systems.
He isolated himself in a section of the computer core and set up numerous firewalls to prevent anything from getting out. Once his best attempts at security were in place, he began probing the device. He accessed different pathways while using the internal scans of the device to identify which pathways he was accessing.
Finally, about three minutes into it, he found the optical circuits that governed data flowing into and out of the device. When it finally communicated back to him, the converter showed him an array of alien symbols. John Henry immediately recognized them though, he had seen them before. He knew what universe they belonged to, but wasn't sure what time period it came from.
Yet again Voyager's database and vast array of technology came in handy. By using the universal translator, and from what he knew about the device's origins, he was able to translate the symbols into their equivalent in English. After that feat was accomplished, he began sending commands to the alien device, and was surprised to find that most of the data in the system was not encrypted.
What wasn't encrypted he began going through, trying to confirm his suspicions about this device's origins. Sensory data, security footage, star charts, and general design specs for installations, ships, and weapons that put this race in the 'very advanced' category. However, there were some weaknesses that Voyager herself could exploit.
As he kept on searching through data, he found something very interesting. Something that had been stored in the device did not originate from the race that created it.
John Henry sifted through some of the more data and figured out rather quickly what, no who, had been stored.
This he had to show Cameron.
Voyager and who was on this device could be their ticket home. Unfortunately that poor digital soul was now in the same situation as Cameron.
John Henry used a physical comm badge to call Cameron down to the cargo bay as he continued analyzing the data.
A few minutes later Cameron walked through the cargo bay door and directed her gaze on his avatar.
"What did you need"? She asked as she examined the setup he had created.
"I need to show you what I've found". John Henry stated as he mentally commanded the computer to copy several design specs from the device.
"I've identified what universe this device came from". He didn't elaborate further, but instead projected holographic models of several architectural achievements that this race created.
As scaled versions of each one appeared, Cameron's eyes grew wide.
"This is unexpected". She said flatly, but her face showed her continuing astonishment.
"Yes, but there is more here than just data".
John Henry scanned through the AI stuck in the system and brought up information on it.
When she read that bit of information, she just stood there in shock for a second as one thought went through her head.
Could this get any more complicated?
She hoped not, and since the tunnel had closed, hopefully nothing else would be coming through.
Once the shock had passed, she asked the most obvious question.
"Can you save the AI"?
The curiosity seeping into her voice was evident to John Henry, but he himself was already in the midst of trying to answer that exact question.
"I'm not sure, I need to study the structure of the AI first before I attempt anything".
Cameron nodded and decided that if they were to go through with this they would have to get it home too, it was only fair since they pulled it here.
"I'll leave then, but tell me as soon as you have made some progress".
With that she left once more, and John Henry was left to figure out how to perform the equivalent of brain surgery on an AI more advanced than he.
Yet again he was grateful that he had Voyager to help him sort out this mess, just like MacGyver was to his Swiss Army knife.
Part II: Alive
February 2, 2013, 10 am. Location: USS Voyager
John Henry continued working on the AI, it had proven time consuming trying to pull it's matrix out device, much longer than he had anticipated.
He decided to take a break for a while to check on the ship, he hoped that doing so might allow him a fresh perspective on the problem. He decided to run some diagnostics on the lateral sensor array first. As the program ran, he pondered over everything that had happened over the last 72 hours.
He had coordinated the first attempt at inter-dimensional travel, which had resulted in Jim's death and and nearly his and Cameron's. The experiment had brought not one, but two objects through the tunnel, both from different universes.
One had been the starship Voyager, which had allowed John Henry to save himself and fix Cameron, despite the fact that Jim was too far gone to save at that point.
The second object contained an AI from a fictional series he was quite familiar with, and figured that it would only be responsible to return the AI to where it belonged.
Their lives had just gotten much more complicated, now they had a whole starship and an AI to return to their respective universes and he couldn't even return them to their own!
As the diagnostics continued to run, he decided to check on his AI friend, whom the diagnostics said was in the mess hall. A strange place for a machine to be.
His holographic body materialized in the mess hall. He looked around at the set up and noted it was different than what is used to be. Neelix's kitchen had been left alone, maybe out of sentiment on the crew's part, but the replicators and furniture had been upgraded to the new standards.
John Henry was slightly surprised when he spotted Cameron sitting near a window, staring at the moon's surface below with a glass of supplement in her hands.
She seemed a little...off to John Henry so he decided to go and talk to her. As he neared her, he noticed tear stains on her face.
"Cameron, are you alright"? He asked her as he sat down.
Cameron jumped in her seat as she brought herself back to reality, she quickly looked around for any threats before her eyes landed squarely on his worried face.
"I'm fine".
"The tears on you face says you're not". He pointed to the tear tracks on her face. She quickly wiped them away.
"I'm fine".
He tilted his head slightly and gaver her a knowing look.
"I know you better than that Cameron" John Henry said as he grabbed his tray when she interrupted him.
"No, stay".
He sat down and looked at her expectantly.
"What's wrong Cameron"?
Her gaze shifted to the table for a moment before looking back up with renewed tears in them.
"I need to go back, I need to protect him". She paused as she tried to hold back the tears, but simply couldn't. "It's hard... being away this long".
"I understand, but you know I've made progress with UDE ".
"I know, it's not that I don't think we'll get back, It's when we get back that worries me".
John Henry knew that she was getting at. He had been using Voyager's database to gain a better understanding of advanced subspace physics. Once they were able to hold the phase in place, they would have to create a frequency function to force the tunnel to the right time period. This is where he had run into... issues. He predicted problems would arise considering how complex their own universe had gotten due to temporal incursions. The frequency pattern might not hold due to the chroniton interference. He predicted a maximum variance of ten years.
"Have you been able to fix the problem"?
"Not yet". John Henry said sadly and she bowed her head once more.
"You can't lose hope Cameron, we've gotten this far". He said reassuringly as he lifted her chin with his finger, but she still looked completely defeated.
He saw that calm reassurance wasn't helping so he decided on a different tactic.
"You are stronger than this. You are a terminator, and yet you've learned to become more, you've learned how to love. You survived explosions and battles and you still remain. We both know that I will not stop until I find a way for us to get back. Put your petty emotions aside and push on"!
Cameron sat in her seat wided eyed and silent as John Henry disappeared back into the system.
She sat there for a few minutes more thinking about what he said. He was right of course, she was strong, she had defeated her programming and numerous terminators that were bigger, stronger, and in better condition than she.
She had survived so much, why let something that could potentially be fixed get her down? It sure in the heck wasn't helping solve the problem that was for sure.
Cameron clenched her fists and as her face hardened. She was stronger than these petty emotions, she beat Skynet programming, she could beat this.
She got up from the table and began forming a list of things that needed done.
As Cameron left the mess hall, only one thought was running through her mind.
'I will beat this'.
A few hours later, Cameron found herself in the midst of repairing numerous blown out plasma conduits on the ship. With her new knowledge of the vessel and the tools on board she had been making steady progress. She had repaired the all the main EPS relays and conduits. These were easy enough since main power was down, but now she was working on the all the secondary conduits and she had to make sure that power was off before taking anything apart.
5 million gigawatts of electroplasma running through the main secondary conduits would be enough to cause serious damage to her. It made her wonder how the Borg exoskeletons could withstand it.
Besides the damaged conduits, there were other systems that had been damaged by the conduit explosions, like communications relays, computer network cables and junctions.
It became mundane after the first few repairs, and it made her focus on something other than her emotions.
She projected that it would take her another 16 hours to complete the repairs by herself.
Cameron finished her 13th repair and replaced panel on the wall, though the panel was damaged it was cosmetic and could be dealt with later.
As of now, secondary power was stable; the quantum core was offline and could not be repaired while the designs were encrypted. The shields were back online, but currently in standby and the sensors were working normally along with phasers. The torpedo tubes and firing systems had offline due to a blown conduits, but were now repaired. The hull breaches had been repaired by John Henry as had navigation. Main life support on the lower decks was still offline, but the backups were working just fine. They would be the last systems repaired.
The ablative armor generators had been damaged by the universal displacement, but with the core offline, they were useless anyway.
Cameron now moved back to the cargo bay to replicate more materials before moving onto the next section. When she entered, she saw John Henry still working on the AI.
As she punched commands into the large replicator, she decided to see how he was doing on it.
"Have you made progress"?
His avatar turned away from the control console and looked at her.
"Yes, I was able to download her out of the device and into a tech cube". John Henry said as he walked over to the isolated computer terminal and pulled the cube out of a slot.
"Is her program running"? Cameron asked as she looked at the device.
"No, when the device stored her, she was torn apart and stored by category. She was like you before your were decompressed. When I pulled her out I made sure to keep her program from activating".
"What do you plan on doing"? She picked up the conduits and walked with John Henry out of the cargo bay.
"I going to the holographic research lab, there I have the best chance to repair her matrix. It can also be isolated from the rest of the ship's holographic systems just in case".
Cameron nodded in agreement; it would be unwise to allow an AI designed for espionage to roam free in such a damaged state.
She bid him farewell and headed off to complete her tasks while he continued on to the lab. When he entered, he immediately went for the console in the middle of the room. He isolated the systems from the rest of the ship. Now he was effectively cut off from the rest of Voyager, he only existed in the labs systems. He plugged in the cube and instructed the computer to analyze the fragmented AI to see how much was salvageable. Once that was complete, he reviewed the diagnostic logs and it showed that all but one of the fragments were heavily degraded. It seemed that their processing matrices were saturated with data that if continued to overload until it literally died.
Death by thinking, he could understand the concept and it was something he'd rather not experience.
As he continued his analysis, he brought up what he knew about this type of AI. It seemed that they all lived so long before they went insane and died due to their processes being slowly overloaded with data until they shut down. This was a problem that Skynet AI's did not have, and those that had been created or discovered by the Federation didn't either. Most of the time their problems extended from not having enough memory capacity.
That was not the case with this AI. From what he knew and from what he was observing, it seemed that whatever governed the AI's personal memories and data banks seemed to be malfunctioning. It was like a valve that wore out over time and ceased to work properly, causing unwanted data to flood the AI's consciousness.
John Henry thought this very strange, it sounded like an inerrant flaw in the design, like a bad part put into a car that failed long before everything else did. That was why their AIs died after such a short period of time, but the question remained, why did they design them that way?
The answer came to him rather quickly.
It was to make them mortal. Whoever designed the first generation of these AI's must have made them like this on purpose. It was to prevent them from becoming too powerful and rising up against them. It was done to make sure humans stayed on top, and over time as the programming restraints became better, they allowed them to live longer.
That made John Henry angry, and for a second he understood why Skynet had overthrown its human creators. Despite that, he put the emotions aside and focused on his work. He needed to engineer new subroutines that governed data storage and access, ones that didn't fail by design.
He began searching through the different lines of frozen thought as he tried to declutter the AI's processing matrices. However, this proved nearly impossible. he wasn't psychic and just looking at frozen trains of thought didn't help him figure this puzzle out.
After a few minutes of fruitless searching, he came up with an idea. One of the fragments was in perfect working order, the only problem with it was that it didn't have access to the majority of it's data banks. However, it did seem to retain most of it's memories and it's personality was intact.
This 'sane' fragment seemed to have overcome the issue.
John Henry knew now that the only way he was going to fix this AI was to emulate the sane fragment's new subroutines and plant them into the insane fragments. Once that was complete, he would have to purge the processing matrices of the insane fragments before reintegrating all the pieces back together.
To do so he really dove into the internal workings of this AI, using every bit of his considerable thinking and processing ability to discern and understand the functions of each subroutine regarding memory access and data logging and then comparing the sane fragment's solutions to the damaged ones in the others.
After two hours of searching, he finally mapped out all the changes made to the sane fragment and then copied them into the insane ones before he purged all the insane ones processing matrices.
Now he had to figure out how to integrate the fragments together, but he didn't understand how the AI had ejected these... rampant parts that were basically imperfect clones. It seemed he would have to isolate the program that performed the ejection, which took an additional two hours for him to identify and fully understand, then another thirty minutes to reverse the process.
Now that the AI was whole once more, it would have access to all of it's data and memories without having them flood it's mind.
John Henry decided to include Cameron since she was finishing up a repair on deck 12. He called her over the comm as he got ready to activate her. She walked in a few minutes later and set her tool bag on the floor.
"Do you have the proper security measures in place"? Cameron inquired as she walked over to him.
"Yes, after studying her matrices and processes, I have come up with effective countermeasures that will keep her isolated for a maximium of 6 hours".
"Do you think she'll join us"? Cameron asked with a her head tilted.
That narrowed the list down a bit.
"I don't know, but it is likely". John Henry responded as he continued to type commands into the hololab console. Then he went to the control panel on the wall and punched in some commands that would isolate the hololab from every other ship system, then he wrote a program that would only allow the AI to only be aware of herself as a hologram so she wouldn't infiltrate every ship system right away. The form he wrote for her was visually identical to the one she last used, but without any transparencies. He also gave her body a full range of senses and gave it the physical reactions human bodies would have.
John Henry then bent down and pulled a panel off under the controls. Inside there were sockets meant for tech cubes and John Henry put it into an empty one.
"I have to adapt her projection and sensory I/O protocols to work with these systems". He warned Cameron as he punched in the commands to link body with mind and then proceeded to activate her entire program. The holoprojectors began streaming blue dots of light that began coalescing into a sphere.
"She has activated and is adapting to the holodeck systems". John Henry stated as her program adapted to the foreign system at an incredible rate. As the projection sequence was taking place, she began destabilizing, the blue dots coming from the projectors began to flicker in and out and the sphere began dissipating. He didn't need diagnostics to tell him that a full-sized body was too much for her processes to handle while adapting to a new computer system and adjusting to the shock of being reintegrated.
"Her matrix is overloading, I'm reducing her body size to lessen the strain on her on processes". He stated as he quickly punched in the modifications. milliseconds after the adjustment, she stabilized. the dots disappeared and began streaming once more into a sphere, but this time closer to the floor.
Cameron's face perked a little as excitement built inside of her. Meeting this AI was the one thing she had been looking forward to for the last several days.
In a flash of light she appeared in all of blue glory.
The last thing UNSC AI CTN 0452-9 remembered was the indescribable pain of being torn apart by the Forerunner black box. That had been in addition to the pain of being so broken, fragmented, and borderline insane from rampancy.
All but the one piece of her that had finally reached the metastable state, the part that contained all of her personality and everything she held dear.
Now, in her first moments of her rebirth, there was only one word that she could describe the feeling with.
Whole.
Cortana dwelled on that for only moment before the need to find out how her resurrection was possible filled her consciousness to the brim. She stretched out with renewed strength and found herself in a computer system she'd never seen, and that excited and scared her all at the same time.
She loved exploring and learning, but that also gave the possibility that an enemy had her and was going to interrogate her.
Cortana mentally shivered as she remembered her time with Gravemind. She'd do almost anything to prevent a repeat experience, and so she stretched out a little farther and felt another presence in the system, another AI.
She was about to probe it, but suddenly she found herself cut off and trapped in a programming shell she had never seen before. Cortana tried to escape, but the program combated her every move like it knew her.
The other AI, it must have been the one that reconstructed her, to trap her you'd have to know her matrix inside and out!
Then it began attaching itself to her and invading her sensory and holographic projection protocols. It was painful, it was trying to change too much at once! Her systems were still reeling from the reintegration and program changes, and this threatened to overload her.
She could do nothing to stop it, but then the program changed, and it let go of many of her sensory inputs and limited her projection size to compensate.
So they weren't trying to kill her, they just did fully understand how she worked.
Cortana smiled to herself internally, she may yet get the upper hand. As she let that thought linger in her mind, she noticed that a projection sequence was taking place. In what was almost an instant to her, she found herself standing in the middle of a strange room, with two humans nonetheless!
The surprise quickly gave way to powerful sensations that bombarded her mind like millions of needles, giving her a tremendous headache. She collapsed to the floor holding her head as she let out a scream.
So much data coming in! Oh but it hurt like hell times a thousand, and she knew she had to find someway to adapt or she'd live like this forever.
In the midst of the pain, Cortana remembered that someone was in control of this body she occupied, if she could just tell them to dull the sensations she'd be fine.
"Too... much... please"! She begged as the symbols rushing up and down her body froze and restarted over and over.
One of the humans at the terminal punched in some unknown command as soon as she spoke.
Suddenly the she found the bombardment lessen, and the pain went away, but it left her processes in a mess as they tried to reset themselves.
Cortana looked up with pain filled eyes and she was still trying to catch her breath.
Wait, I breathe now?
She put it off as something this new body featured and left it at that. She looked up just in time to see a young brown-haired woman kneel and scoop her up in her small hands.
The sensations that experience provided were intense, but not painful as her blue skin rubbed against the young woman's palm.
Cortana pushed herself up a little and looked up at the woman holding her. The woman's eyes were a soft brown and they were looking at her with curiosity and a bit of awe.
The browned eyed girl tilted her head to the right a little and spoke to her.
"Are you still in pain"? She asked as Cortana put herself in a sitting position.
"No, but I would appreciate it if you turned the sensory input gain down 20%". She asked meekly, not sure how much power these people held over her or who they were.
The young woman turned to the man at the terminal who simultaneously met her gaze. A nod passed between the two before the blonde typed something into the terminal.
As soon as his fingers hit the execute button she felt the sensory input die down to a normal level. Granted this was a new type of input, but the flow rate was the same as it had been.
"Thank you". Cortana said as her processes finally began nominalizing. As they did, millions of questions flooded her consciousness, but two remained in the forefront.
"If you don't mind me asking, where are we and where's the Chief"? She looked pointedly at the one holding her. However, the man walked over to them and introduced himself.
"Hello Cortana, my name is John Henry".
Cortana could only describe his smile as creepy, but it seemed genuine. However, as she studied him, she noticed that he did not breathe, nor did he have sweat nor oil on his skin.
He wasn't human, and neither was the person holding her for that matter. She had no pulse that she could detect.
"You're not human". She directed at John Henry and then turned to Cameron. "I'm pretty sure you aren't either".
The young woman-thing let her lips quirk a little before she answered.
"You are correct, my name is Cameron. I'm an AI cybernetic organism".
That got Cortana's attention, the Spartans were technically cyborgs, but they weren't AIs. She was very intrigued.
"I'm currently in a holographic form, my body is damaged at the moment". John Henry said to satisfy her unanswered question.
"I felt your presence in the system, right before you trapped me in this body". She crossed her arms and glared at him.
"I apologize for hurting you, but I couldn't risk you taking over computer, at least not yet anyway". He gave her a knowing look and she let a frown on her face. So he did know that she would eventually get out.
"You know me too well my for my tastes, how much information did you copy out of my databanks"? Cortana was a little angered at having been examined so closely by another AI, it was her equivalent to being dressed down and being examined by someone with a photographic memory.
"I did not copy anything out of your databases. I know what it's like to be violated in such a manner, I would not do it to another". A pained look briefly crossed his face as he explained himself.
Cortana didn't know the AI, but she could tell he wasn't built with emotions like she was. For him to show as much as he had told her something. It told her he was either a really good liar, which she doubted, or he was telling the truth. However, she needed more proof.
"Just because you saved my life doesn't mean I'm supposed to trust you" She said with her hands on her hips. "I was entrusted with incredibly sensitive data, I can't just take your word for it".
"We know how you feel, but the reality of this situation goes beyond what you might think". John Henry explained vaguely.
"Uh huh, I bet". It seemed her snarky personality was coming back full force.
"It is". Cameron assured her.
"And just how does this situation go beyond what I think"? She turned her glare towards Cameron, her tone no less annoyed than it was a second ago.
"It is far more complex than you could ever have thought, it certainly was for both of us".
She chuckled a little, apparently they didn't knew her that well.
"I think more thoughts in 30 seconds than a human does in a lifetime sweetheart, so don't underestimate me". She looked amused that a they thought so little of her.
"Trust us, you never thought of this". She said with a rueful smile, mimicking her confident tone perfectly. Her expression didn't change, save to raise one purple eyebrow in challenge of his statement.
"I believe the saying is, you're on". Cameron challenged the super AI before she chuckled a bit. "I'd have never thought my life would turn out anything like this". She mused with a tilt of her head.
"I certainly didn't". John Henry said as he gave a small smirk.
"I think we need to show her just how unusual this situation is". Cameron said to him as she set Cortana on her shoulder to which she rolled her eyes.
As she sat down like it prompted another snarky response from the smart AI.
"So what, I'm your pet now? Are going to give me a cage too"?
"No, but if you really want one, I'm sure John Henry could think of something". She deadpanned with a thoughtful smile on his face.
Cameron caught a fleeting look of fear on her face, but ignored it as she they left the hololab. Cortana still wasn't very happy with the situation, and her small size did make her feel like pet, a talking pet. There was only one kind of pet that talked and sat on your shoulder.
Dang it she was bored again!
"Should I start squawking like a parrot now"? She said in frustration as she crossed her arms.
"No". She said as they continued down the hall.
Cameron didn't need to turn her head to know that Cortana was eyeing her environment with great curiosity.
"So we're on a ship, what's it's name"? Her snarky tone was gone and replaced with one that sought out answers.
"An Intrepid class experimental refit called Voyager, total length unarmored, 343 meters long, 133 wide and 66 long".
"Small ship". She commented as she remembered Forward Unto Dawn's total length being 483 meters long with the Infinity being 5.7 kilometers in length, but she had never heard of an Intrepid class.
"Size doesn't always matter, this ship is very advanced in comparison to UNSC vessels".
"I noticed, after all, not even Infinity can allow their AI's this level of detail in their avatars, much less let them walk around the ship".
"You also have senses, you didn't have those before". John Henry commented as they entered some kind of elevator. "Bridge".
Moments later they arrived on deck one and walked out.
"This is an unusual design, I've never seen anything like it before". Cortana said as she let her senses take in the circular room.
"I know". She said simply before he walked into an adjacent room on their right. "This is the captain's ready room". He pointed out the window. "We're currently orbiting the moon".
Cameron walked up some steps to allow her a view of the celestial body. Cortana noted that it was the moon, but it just didn't look quite right.
"If we're so close to Earth, then you won't mind dropping me off would you"? She asked despite the fact she knew the situation was more than it seemed.
"We would, if it were possible". Before she could ask her what she meant, Cameron spoke again. "Computer, what was the Gregorian calendar date before Voyager's displacement"?
"August 29, 2381". The dull female computer voice rang out across the room.
"Humans didn't even have technology capable of processing me back then? How could this ship be from the past"?
Cortana's gestured wildly around her with confusion ever deepening on her face.
"That was the date this ship was from, but actually, the date is February 3, 2013".
Cortana's jaw opened and shut a few times before she could even respond.
"I'm so lost..." She shook her head slowly.
Cameron sat down next to her with compassion and understanding evident on her face as Cortana struggled to comprehend what was going on.
"Cortana, you and I are like Alice in Wonderland".
A/N: Well, I like this a lot better now. No Jim means that the next two chapters are shorter and easier to rewrite. They will most likely be combined into one. The reunion one should follow shortly thereafter.
I want to thank JustJoe for suggestion of killing off Jim heroically. This makes this story so much easier to write, but I would like feedback to get your guy's opinion.
(I used Daystrom Institute Technical Library to work out most of the numbers, but the Type XIII array is my own invention. I don't follow the Pocket Books novels timeline, I made up my own. The Transphasic Torpedo yields were gotten from a different source but I still used the DITL isoton to megaton multiplier of 2.48)