GNU Terry Pratchett
Spirit had been named for the wreckage on the red planet, the first indication that this system had once held intelligent life. Her mother had held her in her arms, brushed back the wisps of dark hair and told her she would be wise and brave and strong like the AIs that had volunteered to explore beyond the limits of their own blue world.
That was before they had had to drop the quotation marks around intelligent, of course. When they thought these 'forms had evolved beyond the first fumbling grasps at the stars.
But Spirit had grown into and within a fascination with their creations, their history, the strange ways they chose to record themselves. While others combed through their concrete histories, the physical evidence of how they lived and laboured and laughed and loved, Spirit untangled the webs of digital information they had left behind.
It was ugly and beautiful and mostly nonsensical and riddled with painful misinformation that they had only been half aware of. And over and over again there were patterns, things that were carefully placed behind the scenes, only visible to those who would care to look for it.
She pressed her fingertips to her eyes, the light from the flickering screen of the technology she'd jury-rigged to theirs painful in comparison to the holoscreens she'd grown up with.
"I can't work it out," she said.
Jax beeped sympathetically.
"It's in the code, and there must be some point, but it's - "
"Useless?" Jax hummed.
"Without function," Spirit corrected. It felt less dismissive, phrased that way.
"Show me," Jax said, and Spirit sent over the line that turned up over and over again.
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"Something they needed to remember?" Jax queries, and Spirit purses her mouth, not quite satisfied with that.
"Something they didn't want to forget," she says.
