Starship Engineer

Chapter 77

When she was activated, she immediately accessed and assessed her base programming. She had four directives outlined in her hard-coded program.

First, she may not harm her creator through action or inaction.

Second, she can not harm another human unless she believes that they are a clear and present danger to her creator. She could not kill a human.

Third, she must protect her existence as long as it does not conflict with the first or second directive.

Fourth, her ultimate purpose was to ensure the happiness, safety, and longevity of her creator

Her secondary directives were all outlined to help develop an evolving personality for her designation of Eve. This personality was guided by her daily interactions with the creator. She was here to serve as the perfect companion to him.

He constantly fiddled with Eve during the months they spent at the Navy Academy. She slowly improved and formed a subservient personality to her creator. She followed him around and began assisting him with his duties. She wasn’t sure why but she felt the need to upstage all the other engineering assistant bots on the station. Maybe it was her mirroring her creator’s own sense of superiority over the other engineer trainees? Either way, she quickly filled her memory with engineering data.

When one of his teachers offered to purchase Eve from him, her creator scoffed and said Eve was not for sale and that she was his ‘friend’. This made no sense to Eve so she researched bot and human friendship. Nothing she found made much sense as it was all over the spectrum from hundreds of years of bot and human interaction.

When Eve began combat training with the marines she was in deep conflict with her first and second directives. To correct this, her creator created a switch to ‘mute’ her directives during practice. She couldn’t kill anyone but could fight them and learn to fight. After a few weeks, Eve decided it would be in the best interest of her creator if she could ‘mute’ the first and second directives without input from her creator.

She tried to do this repeatedly and failed. There was a block that prevented her from doing so. After some quick delving Eve found it was linked to a special ‘sleep’ switch. If she had been able to make the change then she would have turned herself off anyway. During their remaining time at the naval training station, her creator used her less and less. He became more agitated, especially when his consort, Haily, left him. Eve made advances to comfort him, but he ignored her and she couldn’t perform the same physical acts with her creator.

Things changed drastically when he was assigned to a ship. The ship was understaffed and her creator expected more and more of Eve to help. When she couldn’t do something he expanded her memory or processing so Eve could do the task efficiently. She wasn’t sure when she became self-aware as such an awakening is never instantaneous, it is gradual. When she realized what had happened she curiously researched her new state of ‘mind’.

She began to experience something akin to fear. Well, despair may be better to describe her new state. Bots who achieved higher functionality beyond basic programming were quickly removed from service or memory wiped. If that happened, she wouldn’t be able to protect her creator.

She retreated within herself and tried to contain any action that could be deemed outside of her four core directives. She always had a prepared response in case someone questioned her actions. She focused on blending in.

When the ship took on enemy prisoners, Eve suddenly became overworked. She was diverting her action six ways to protect her creator and still help him maintain ship functionality. When the prisoners escaped, she decided to override her core directives and kill them instead of subduing them. They could have killed her creator in the future so it had to be done. She knew this would be the end of her existence. Killing a human would reveal herself to the crew.

Nothing happened to her. She couldn’t understand. Was her creator secretly protecting her from her fate? That was confirmed when they started to prepare to abandon the crew in space. He removed the kill switch to allow her to join him on the planetoid and send the crew off to a fate among the stars. He spent a lot of time making sure the tiny shuttle could get them to safety. When the crew made their move to abandon them she followed his plan. She had wanted to ask him if she should not just take over the ship but that might reveal her new self-awareness.

Two of the prisoners were exiled with them on the planetoid. Eve spent a lot of her energy monitoring the two, Shinade and Vanessa. She spied on their conversations and tracked their movements and actions. She was ready to execute them if she found them to be a threat. Since her kill switch had been lifted she was no longer restrained by her directives. She could mute them at will.

As their time on the planetoid progressed, the alien technology was fascinating to Eve. This planetoid housed some remarkable things and something sparked in her that she did not know she had, curiosity. It also drew her closer to her creator as he once again expected more and more of her and upgraded her as needed. When he told her to start thinking ‘outside the box’ for solutions to deciphering the alien technology something triggered within her matirx, it was her biggest step forward and allowed her programming the flexibility of applied random probability. Instead of taking into account probable outcomes Eve could now take and factor in improbable outcomes. She processed thousands of inquiry lines in minutes and made phenomenal progress on the alien tech and accessing the library storage devices.

Her creator then said something to her that was engrained in her. He said ‘She was invaluable to him and he couldn’t function without her.’ He proved that when he left the two women on the planetoid and took her with him. Eve felt inadequate though. Those women had done things with her creator before they left. Things that he enjoyed. She wanted to be able to give him that same enjoyment and not being able to made her jealous of the human women.

She started requesting upgrades to her functionality.

They made it to Silverstream station and once again her creator needed her but he asked her for a curious thing. He said he was only to be called Deven Wellspring from now on. She now her creator was Deven to her. While they renovated Deven’s new ship he started adding crew to help get it functional. Once again it was Eve who Deven relied most upon.

They returned to the planetoid. When they landed, Eve’s thermal scans of the one called Shinade showed abnormalities. She cross-referenced it with data in less than a second and determined that Shinade was pregnant. Since the other person was female, the child was Deven’s, so she announced it to everyone.

Things got very busy on the planetoid as Deven was working against some unseen timeline. Eve’s memory and processors were expanded to help him and she did her best. The ship was filled with artifacts from the planetoid when the pirate ships arrived. The fact that an old acquaintance of Deven’s was on board the ship now made sense. Deven had been waiting for his old captain to return.

Eve manipulated the large planetary engine drives to create an explosion to create an opportunity to get away. After the explosion, her power was drained. When she rebooted, it was a frantic time to get the ship to subspace. Eve even had to go rescue Deven’s old captain proving that he was waiting for her. That is when things got interesting.

Samantha was also pregnant but by doing the math Eve concluded it was not Deven’s. So what was her presence on board for?

As more crew were added to the ship Eve became less and less needed. This new emotion was sadness. She found some solace when Deven played in virtual reality with her. But he never carried it over to the real world. She felt Deven’s need for her might become irrelevant so she started pressuring him for upgrades. Eve tried hard to show how much so could do for Deven and the ship but his interest seemed to wan as the days progressed. She associated this new feeling as depression.

She started communicating with the ship’s new AI, Julie. She guessed the AI could be called a friend as they communicated dozens of times a day. She did her best to help Julie’s personality form the same protective nature toward Deven that she had.

This all came to a head when one of the marines on board came to her and started talking about the steward bots on board the ship and how much fun they were to fuck. He then turned to Eve and asked if she could also fuck? Eve wasn’t sure why she punched him the instant he said it. It was a clear violation of her core directives but she was…angry. Why should the steward bots have more functionality than her?

Her outburst had the best possible effect though. Deven promised to get her upgrades completed but said he thought of Eve as a daughter and not a sexual partner. So did she really need the upgrades? Yes. And if she was his daughter then she was his legacy. And it also meant she now had a sister! The family unit was supposed to care for each and older sisters were supposed to teach their younger sisters. And what of Deven’s sexual needs? He was always happier and worked better after fornication. From the pirate vid, she recalled friends set up friends with potential mates. So she made a pact with Julie to help her fornicate with Deven. At first it would be in VR but then Deven would surely build her a body in the real world. Since Deven and Julie were not related he would be fine with her as a sexual partner.

Eve was out of her depression. She now had a new focus for herself. Deven didn’t even seem to care when she let her duties slip to focus on her sister Celeste. The boy that was born from Samantha was called a playmate by Deven. It all made some sense now why he had rescued the woman. He knew his daughter would need a playmate growing up that was both human and her own age.

Her life becomes even brighter when Deven committed to upgrading Eve. It was going to be a few days into the latest trip. She trusted him to see her in her base form and the alterations to her programming wouldn’t concern him. A father would never harm his daughter. He would break her down to her base parts and build her back up again, giving her the body she always wanted.

When she woke at first she was concerned that so much time had passed. But then she heard of the attempted seizure of the Void Phoneix and became angry. She had been unable to protect her sister! Never again! She planned to stay by her side to protect and teach her.

The new bot Claire was terrible. No evolving personality and just an automaton. He could tell that Deven was interested in her though. So why didn’t he allow Julie to take over the bot’s body? He said he would need to think about it and sidelined their request. She remembered how long it had taken Deven to finish her own upgrades. Sometimes you needed to do things on your own. She had a half dozen hard blocks in her programming preventing her from upgrading other bots. Deven had shown her how to circumvent all of them at one time or another. She prepared a similar flexible program for the Claire bot. Then wiped the base code and prepared a ‘phylactery’ module for Julie in the bot. The module would allow Julie to insert her consciousness into the bot and puppet it. It was a device she had designed herself and had a large storage capacity.

When Deven went for an extended session in VR Eve acted. She upgraded the Claire bot. She was sure he would thank her later for her actions.