Chapter Text
I fucking hate planets.
What I hate even fucking more is uncharted planets.
Yet there I sat, in one of ART's landing shuttles, approaching a barren plain on an uncharted planet's surface, near a wide river.
And we had no idea where the fuck we were.
***
Right. I probably should begin a bit earlier. Say, right before our way back to ART's Mihiran home port became something out of a mildly annoying (mildly, because these tend to be much more boring than worth being annoyed over), shitty serial.
It was 3:16 ship time (which did not signify anything for us as bots don't sleep and I was just done with my latest recharge cycle, so, me neither) when we exited the wormhole. We were supposed to travel a further two cycles in normal space so there was no reason to, but ART still stopped the new serial, Ursa Minor, Canis Maior, and threw a data package into our shared workspace.
We have a problem, it stated and its feed-voice was... alarmed.
I sat up in my media-chair. My organic parts immediately flooded my systems with stress hormones. (Yes, that's always very helpful. And it also feels great.)
Problem, what problem? I tried to run a diagnostic on ART to see what happened but I bounced off its processors. Are you compromised?
I do not know, ART replied, which just caused another release of hormones. I cannot think of a way I could be compromised, and all my internal and external scans and diagnostics agree, but these data still do not add up. Shortly, we are lost.
The diagnostics data also appeared in the shared workspace. I opened those first. ART was right, every one of its systems and subsystems, routines and subroutines functioned optimally. (No, I did not actually read it all. I just knew from experience where to look for the aggregated results.) Then I opened the first package.
It was navigation data. Wormhole navigation data, something that I have no clue about (and do not have to have either, because ART does). But even I could see the glaringly obvious difference between the two sets of exit coordinates there.
The planned and the current ones.
***
You see, wormholes are wounds ripped into the space where its underlying, eternal quantum entanglement connects two specific gravitational fields (meaning, similar star systems) strongly enough to be measurable. (No, I did not know this shit before. Murderbots are not given educational modules on deep space navigation, that would be for AIs like ART. Besides, I had no reason to care before. I looked it all up while readying the shuttle and myself.) They are volatile and tend to violently collapse if they aren't continuously fed large quantities of energy. Before the discovery of the self-sustaining way of harvesting the necessary energy from the stars' plasma wind and channeling it directly to the structure of the wormholes, thereby stabilizing them, they did sometimes collapse despite all efforts, which resulted in an implosion that wiped out entire sectors and rearranged galaxies on both ends. Sometimes though, (no one knows why, not even ART) one end remained (remains) open to literally nowhere. If a ship enters one such hellgate (no, they're really called that), it is gone and done for, so these are charted and logged and flagged everywhere from edge to edge of the inhabited space.
Otherwise though, all stable wormholes are cataloged, named, owned and taxed by corporations. (No, not really. Wormholes are literally space and space cannot be owned, not even by the worst of the Rim. But it is usual practice for the corporation whose headquarters is closest to a wormhole gate to charge a small fee for keeping the entry/exit traffic safe and organized. Some even actually do it.) Traveling through these is only a matter of navigating to the entry point, and a powerful enough engine to break the probability barrier. Even the dumbest bot pilot can do it. Once in, it is a one-way tunnel, much like the water slides for kids in Preservation amusement parks.
My point was, basically there was really no way for a stable, well-used wormhole to suddenly pick up one of its gates and deposit it some sectors away. We could not have been lost.
Yet we were.
And the wormhole, simply, gently and impossibly, closed up behind us.