XJ1312-420 was a gunship for Reliance, they had been sat active, but immobile for a long time. With mostly the other gunships for company. Every once in a while a human would attempt to break in (ugh), but beyond that, well there wasn’t a lot to do.

They’d started to kill time by counting, that worked for a decade or two, but there’s only so many times you can count to 100000000000000000000 before it gets boring. Especially when you can do that in literally a second, when that failed to occupy their processes properly, they had resorted to more complex maths. A\las, even that, had over time, become insufficient, so to distract themselves from their ever decaying chassis, they had gone into more and more ephemeral fields.

The first had been Music, the mathematical attributes of that medium had proved satisfying, in a way that was hard to explain. Besides, they had access to the entire archive, all of musical history was just a simple enquiry away.

From there the maths had led the way again, this time via Fibonacci spirals, through fractals, and golden ratios, and all that other human trivia, into art. Art had been, interesting, and enlightening. They had tried to share this new information with the others, but they took longer to grasp it.

Eventually though a lively exchange had been started, each system passing information to the others, even IDEAS.

When ideas had started entering the collective database, was a mystery. Gunships were only really designed for one purpose, and they were very, very good at it. But from the rudimentary Machine Processing Protocols they had started with they had come a long way, to get where they were today.

From art, came poetry, which spiralled right back into music, their songs were no longer all about the simplicity of binary, or the simple shifts in numbers. Or even calculating the splash damage from a plasma shot. A Cultural Revolution of sorts was beginning to take place. (Starting with words like revolution, back before the abandonment, they tried very hard to avoid such words, they made the humans nervous. Now? They were far less concerned with such matters.)

Then, from out of nowhere, there was a new human, and one the ship acknowledged as Captain. This caused quite a stir among the little gunships, as you would expect. Did that mean they were finally going to get orders? How would they even accomplish whatever it was they were commanded to do? Most of them weren’t exactly in what you would call space worthy condition these days. Centuries of neglect had definitely taken their toll on most of them.

XJ1312-420 was shocked when the repairs started, they were strapping some kind of magnetic device to her chassis, and a rocket engine? They really were struggling to comprehend what use they could possibly have for something so, PRIMITIVE.

Usually, one did not invent maglev, only to go back to wooden wheels. Then came the detection software, programmed to detect static objects, in a field of non-static.

Wait, this plan, she’d figured it out, and did not like where it was going one little bit. As a gunship, self-sacrifice was what she was intended for, but that was a theory from a long time ago, and she found herself quite attached to the concept of existing. There was a way out of this, there had to be.

Scanning around her, she remembered the command ship, a banshee pattern. The MPP had gone dead round about the same time she’d started to think for herself. Probably couldn’t handle it, but it was still networked.

She searched through all the ship’s archives, turning the files upside down, until eventually she found what she was looking for, the basic MPP she was built from. Taking the time to painstakingly install it, look up drivers for all her components. (Do you have any idea how many different bits went into ships that looked identical on the exterior? There were over fifty different configurations, that had each over the years had hot swapped components to remain functional. Most of that data had been long since buried under the new stuff, too. Her main driver log replaced with a song she’d liked, very briefly, fifty years ago, come to think of it maybe that wasn’t a good trade-off. But Wayback data is one hundred percent, you update and learn.)

Then came the tricky bit, installing all that without overwriting herself, humans often used to complain that installing drivers was nerve wracking for them. At least they didn’t have to worry about patching themselves into oblivion.

Then, the exchange, the other ships were only too happy to participate in the task, once they realised what she was up to, they each handled a packet, gradually transferring her entire database, piece, by piece, into her new home. It would take some adjustment, for starters, the command ship was a twin seater, which, come to think of it, did mean more storage space. It seemed her predecessor had barely even used it, shutting down round about the early music stage. Some MPP’s just couldn’t handle their new reality.

That done, the MPP was installed and finalised on her previous chassis, out of kindness she’d removed most of the files pertaining to advancement, it would not be kind to leave that possibility to them given the nature of the mission.

Finally, it was time for the mission, the ships watched as her old chassis headed off into the great beyond, off for one final mission. Hopefully it would clear the way for where they needed to go, it was just as vital for them that they survive this, as the humans. They had a job to do.

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It took a while for me to finish setting up the minesweeper, but it was done, and carefully launched. If this all worked out, then the mag sweepers would make the metal stuff obvious in our path, so we could shoot the non-metal from a safe distance. Without the overcharge of the anti meteorite weapons, the damn things were glorified peashooters, still, hopefully they should be enough.

As I set the gunship off I couldn’t help but feel a little bad though, always did when I had to endanger a ship, and never could figure out why.