“Do you request help or information?”
Rush looked up to the now almost familiar frame of the hologram and she looked back, quietly waiting for an answer and slightly flickering. He looked down at the console that displayed another locked database.
“I need access to this database.”
“It is part of the main system.”
“Good. I need access,” he insisted.
“I can not grant you access to the main core. I have told you before, remember?”
He remained silent for a few minutes, staring at the display, as if he could force it to open up for him by just wishing hard enough. Hearing a sound that was almost something like a giggle, he looked up.
“You are funny, do you know that?” She smiled widely.
He narrowed his eyes. No one had ever considered him ‘funny’. Well, except Gloria, who had always loved his sense of humour. A wave of wonderful, yet painful memories floated through his mind and he blinked away a solitary tear.
She furrowed her brow watching him. He was a puzzling specimen of his kind and she wondered if she would ever be able to understand them. He seemed so eager to learn and yet he didn’t understand even the simplest things. She decided to test him, before taking him more seriously.
“What do you want?” she asked with soft-spoken voice.
He faltered, thinking of all the people aboard the ship. He clearly wanted to stay and learn, but they wanted to go home. Maybe this was a way of combining both wishes. He could tell her about the desperate wish of the others, gain her sympathy for their pain, ask her to give him access to the ship’s systems and then use it for his own agenda.
“We want to go home to see our families and loved ones and go back to our lives. We are billions of light-years away from Earth without any hope of ever getting home,” he said trying to sound convincing and make her empathise the needs of the other people.
She looked at him in silence for a while.
“What do you want?” Her tone was aggravatingly patient.
“I told you,” he replied, hardly able to stay calm. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to be honest. What do you want?”
He closed his eyes. No more games, he decided, he was no match for her.
“I want to learn.”
She smiled. “And so you shall.”
She disappeared in the usual way and Rush turned back to the console. To his disappointment, the database was still locked. He felt crestfallen, even betrayed, until he took a closer look and found something else.
Another formerly locked database was now opened. It had nothing to do with the ships systems, but it contained a vast amount of information about the ships journey. All the data Destiny collected during her travel through the galaxies, countless details about stars, planets, gas formations she had passed by.
He rubbed his eyes and started reading.
~~~***~~~
A few days later, when Destiny had dropped out of FTL again, Young radioed Rush to inform him that another planetary mission was about to start.
“Tell them to collect samples of plants, rocks and whatever they find. We need to analyse them and see what the synthesizer can make of them. Lt. Johanson will provide a list of chemicals she considers useful.”
“Understood. Anything else?”
Rush sighed. “If you find a key to Destiny’s main frame, let me know.”
The answer was a hoarse laughter and he switched off the radio.
Rush’s moods had improved. He still wasn’t what people would call a pleasant acquaintance, but he was calm and focused on his work without yelling at people. He remained mostly on his own, he rarely ate with the others in what they had turned into the cafeteria of the ship, but he returned the brief greetings of others, who when they passed by in the corridors of the ship.
He still didn’t sleep much, yet the overwhelming tiredness had vanished from his face. His work did seem to suit him and although Young inquired after concrete results from time to time, he managed to put him off each time.
Actually he hadn’t told Young about the hologram. He had told nobody at all, in a peculiar way it seemed to be something private. She never appeared when anyone else was there, not even when one of Eli’s kinos was sneaking around, as if she tried to avoid anyone witnessing her appearance.
The thought that she was only a hallucination of his overfatigued brain came to his mind at one point, but he brushed it away. He knew that the Ancients used holographic projections to support the crews of their ships and that there was one in Atlantis too. So it was obviously nothing out of the ordinary for such a system component to be here.
And he was indeed flattered, that he - of all the people on the ship - was her choice to communicate with. Although he knew, he was of course the only logical choice.
“Was the database satisfactorily?”
Rush looked up from the console and smiled. “Very. Uhm … Thank you.”
“Very pleased to be of service.”
He frowned, he had never experienced her so polite. Sometimes he thought her program must have a random choice of personalities implemented.
“So you are learning?”
He looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Yes, I am.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Her smile was so sweet, so lovely; he had to blink several times to see if he was hallucinating.
He took a deep breath. “You know what I really wish for.”
She sighed and flickered.
“I can not grant you access to the main core database, at least not unless you have proven worthy of me talking seriously with you.”
“What do I have to do to be worth the trouble?” he asked with a slightly sarcastic undertone in his voice.
Another intense flicker indicated power issues, but he didn’t care at the moment. He concentrated on the hologram, desperately hoping this was the moment of a breakthrough.
She remained silent.
“You have asked me who I am. I return the question. Who am I?” she said after several minutes.
“What?!?” He was at the end of his tether, after all these days she had been obviously testing him, playing with him. And he was tired of it.
Staring at her, as if he was trying to force her by the pure strength of his will, he just wanted to put an end to this stupid game.
“Answer the question and I will start talking to you.”
“You are talking to me.”
“Yes, I am. In a way. Not in the proper way I should talk to someone who wants to run the ship.”
“And you need the answer to this simple question to find out who is the right choice?”
“Is it a simple question?”
He didn’t answer.
“I need to know that you understand what you are dealing with. That you truly understand the ship and the nature of this mission. Prove to me that you are what I believe you are. What I hope you are.” There was a pleading note in her voice that struck him.
He closed his eyes to concentrate.
“Who are you? Are you the AI of the ship? Are you a help system, installed to support the crew? Are you Destiny herself? Does the ship actually have a consciousness?” he muttered under his breath. He had been going over these questions many times before, but he had never really needed an answer.
Automatically he started pacing the area in front of the console, totally focused, lost in thought, mumbling whatever came to his mind. “Or are you …”
A thought appeared, crawling through his mind like a spider, weaving a web, connecting details of data he gathered from Destiny’s databases. It drew thin lines between information he read in the reports of the famous SG-1 team and the Atlantis-mission concerning the ancients and their understanding of their own nature and their fondness for enigmatic entrances, hidden clues and cryptic messages. Connecting all these pieces of data to her variable and irritating behaviour towards him, his idea made more and more sense.
He stopped pacing, turned to her and looked her in the eyes.
“You’re their legacy, aren’t you?” he asked solemnly. “You are what remained of the original crew, the creators of the ship and its AI.”
She didn’t answer, just looked at him.
“You are all of it, the ship‘s AI, the crew, all the minds melted into one to preserve all their knowledge and all their achievements.”
“To preserve and to offer when needed,” she concluded. “We are Destiny.”
He was speechless in the light of the truth, unable to do anything but stare at her and try to understand the complexity of the entity facing him.
With a bright smile she nodded. “Very well done.” She looked contently at him. “Now we can talk.”
An overwhelming sensation of happiness filled his mind and he could not hold back a wide smile.
Wonders and secrets … and he was about to start exploring them.
-End