Ash opened his eyes as he slowly floated amidst death and destruction. As he reflected on how he got here, it became clear who, what and where he was now. His systems completed a full diagnostic. The only cautionary items were a missing micro-fission reactor, an optional feature anyway, and the death of his synthetic skin, which meant most tactile senses were offline.

The spec sheet in his head noted the chassis that was his body now was vacuum rated, but only for emergencies and not as a matter of course. Once he was in a standard air mix, the dead skin would fall off and slowly regrow over the course of a day, assuming his internal feedstocks were sufficient to fabricate it.

What he was was an artificial intelligence housed in the chassis of a human form fully synthetic robot. He's not sure if his internal spec sheet is full of PR from whoever made him, but he appears to be a pretty high-end product. A bodyguard slash "companion android." He glanced down at his substantial chest and realised android was the wrong word as this body was female.

Given that his new body appears to be a young Japanese woman with a body built for sex, he is reasonably confident about what companionship this body was initially designed to provide. He makes a solemn vow not to go searching for any memories, if they exist, of the former inhabitant of this body.

He didn't agree to sex reassignment, but, honestly, he couldn't bring himself to care that much. His new digital mind was at its most basic, a human's neural network running in an emulator. Therefore, while he experienced all normal emotions, panic was not one of them. Panic results from a runaway feedback loop of adrenaline and hormones, and his current emulation settings only allow him to get, at most, "very concerned."

Also, he didn't truly feel as though he was locked into this body. Instead, his true physical form was a surprisingly compact hot-swappable quantum computing module that was currently plugged into this fembot body.

He could leave at any time. Although, frankly, unplugging your brain from your body kind of sounded like the equivalent of a person performing neural surgery on themself. Even if he programmed a robotic arm to do it, what if it fucked it up and he ended up disembodied like a boy's discarded Super Nintendo cartridge? He is pretty confident that the users of androids, not the androids themselves, are supposed to handle this operation.

After his diagnostics finished, he noticed a file being transferred to him wirelessly, source unknown; his integrated radio direction finders built into his skull did not detect any transmissions on any bands. It was a text file and several encryption keys of unknown providence, a letter from that djinn woman:

He considered himself clever, but his main area of expertise was in military strategy and logistics. The letter was full of technobabble that he would have enjoyed reading only if it were in a novel. His internal chronometer reported it only took him 2 milliseconds to decide that not utilising those encryption keys was nothing more than suicide. He loaded them into his active memory.

An epic shit ton of data was stuffed into his brain, but he found most of it was indexes. He couldn't help but feel somewhat relieved; he was worried his personality would be irrevocably damaged from a flood of blueprints and millions of hours of university lectures, research papers and data. Instead, it functioned as... well, precisely what the letter said it was, a database. Anytime he considered a topic, he was able to, at will, instantly reference this colossal database of knowledge about that particular subject. It wasn't all dumped into his memory like he was dreading.

For example, he just learned a great deal about computer databases of all kinds. A couple of hundred threads of his awareness read about it in the database while others simultaneously pondered it more generally.

That was a weird feeling. Ash stopped himself from dropping too deep into the rabbit hole of this store of knowledge when he started reading things about sensory multiplexing and parallel processing. He had started reading these topics when he tried to explain the feeling of thinking of many different things at once.

Ash reread the letter, this time spending a significant amount of time over each term he did not understand:

A class 4 AI is an AI that is indistinguishable from a human in all respects and superior in many. A class 5 AI was a forbidden hyperintelligence. If a nation found out their neighbour was working on a secret class 5 AI project, it was common to go to war preemptively to stop it as it was almost universal that any mind past a certain IQ became psychopathic. However, the mind engineers of the "future" believed that this was a band or range rather than an upper limit and that it might be possible to create an AI that is so smart it is no longer a psychopath. Still, research in this direction usually ended in planets being glassed from orbit. He had many designs for bots and expert systems in his design database but only up to a class 2 AI, which wouldn't be considered sapient -- although it could usually fake it convincingly depending on its scope and speciality.

His high-speed intelligence meant that he could ramp his "frame rate" or perception of time up very high; at his highest setting, he watched milliseconds tick by at the same subjective speed seconds used to, or even a little more slowly.

Ash might not be a chess master, but he bet he could beat many of them just by using his high parallelism and frame rate to think of hundreds of thousands of possible board states and win that way. The only thing he could think about that was: Cool.

What wasn't great were his overall chances of survival. This space station was utterly dead, there were no detectable electromagnetic emissions at all, and it was in a Lagrange point, L2. That is the point on the far side of the moon's orbit.

After he searched his internal database, Ash realised that the station's position was tragic.

Keeping an object in L2 was like balancing an unspinning basketball on your finger; it was barely considered a practical Lagrange point, and it is only useful with significant stationkeeping.

A dead space station can't fire thrusters to keep itself in L2, so sooner rather than later, Ash will probably find himself in a slow descent followed by a fatal impact with the lunar surface.

The fact that it had not already happened must be one way where that woman adjusted causality -- it probably wouldn't be fair if she transmigrated him right before the station impacted the moon.

These grim facts, at least, made setting goals easy. Ash's goal was to stabilise this station's orbit or abandon it somehow if that is not possible. By his internal Chrono, it has been less than thirty seconds since he booted up, but it certainly has felt like a lot longer. Without power, nothing is possible.

The first goal was to assess the station's fusion reactor and restart it. Then, hopefully, the reactor's capacitors and power cells are charged; otherwise, it would be impossible to start ignition, and Ash was fucked.

There is no light at all, he realises. At least none in the visible spectrum, he corrects himself. What Ash was seeing was a grayscale image produced by his onboard synthetic aperture radar system. The radar returns were automatically post-processed and presented as visual data. There are potent transceivers built into both femurs, apparently. He pushes off the floor gently to start moving as he ramps up the radar to provide a three hundred and sixty-degree view -- which doesn't give him a headache like he thought it might.

He did not expect to have an astronaut experience in his life. However, if he proceeded stupidly and he jumped wrong, he might accidentally fly through some hole in the bulkhead and out into deep space. That would serve him right for being stupid.

He thankfully discovered that while all of his predecessor's memories were gone from his circuits, many hardwired baseband programming persisted. The primary purpose for this body... okay, realistically probably the secondary purpose was as a bodyguard.

A bodyguard that was non-functional in a hazardous environment, like microgravity, was useless. Wouldn't that be when a person might need a bodyguard the most? He activated these functions and let his mind take a backseat, and kind of rode on autopilot in Zero-G.

He had to manually open each pressure door as he proceeded from corridor to corridor on his way to what he judged to be the centre of the station where the engineering spaces would be.

Judging from the 3d map Ash generated, each corridor he had been in had been slightly skewed, like they suffered severe torsion forces. Like a big angry god twisted the tube somewhat like he was trying to give it an Indian burn.

Clearly, there were significant forces involved in this "time travel." This explains why the atmosphere was evacuated and why everyone appears to be dead.

However, it doesn't explain why all the bots, battery-powered devices, panels and electronics are non-functional also.

Ash couldn't help but compile all this data together, along with surface-level radar mapping of the deactivated bots, which was starting to give him an idea. But, of course, he dearly hoped he was wrong.

Ash was surprised to discover going into the engineering spaces, his way was blocked by a pressure door he could not open because there was still an atmosphere on the other side. He can't vent the atmosphere even if he wanted to; none of the electronics works, and unlike the female androids in some anime he has seen, he doesn't have a plasma gun built into his finger.

While he does have a stunner built into his left palm, those types of weapons are a combination of electrolaser and sonic weapon and were designed to render humans unconscious. Unfortunately, this type of weapon became less useful in a vacuum and entirely useless against a hardened steel blast door.

Ash had to backtrack and continue the other way, circling around until he could find a way in. Finally, after almost thirty minutes of search, he located a secondary entrance which was constructed using a full airlock rather than just an emergency curtain pressure door. The electronics also did not work, but he could close the outer airlock door behind him. If the door didn't have a solid seal, then he was fucked here, too.

You could operate the manual pump-down lever in reverse, which would pump air slowly into the lock from the interior precisely for this scenario. Once the pressure was equalised, the interior door should be able to be opened.

He supposed he could have used this pump to slowly vent the air from the entire engineering section, but honestly, after calculating how long that would take, Ash felt he would instead prefer crashing into the moon.

He did not hear any tell-tale hissing of the atmosphere escaping from the airlock after he began pumping it in, which heartened him greatly.

As Ash pumped the atmosphere inside the lock, a function he did not even realise he had activated and a quick spectrographic analysis on the air was performed. There was a normal mix of O2 and nitrogen, but significant levels of radioisotopes of iodine, caesium and strontium as well as plutonium and americium.

While the specific isotopes couldn't be identified with the level of equipment he had built into his body, it could easily be inferred.

Ash was expecting some radioactivity, especially if the fusion reactor was partly damaged and was scrammed suddenly but not these elements. This mix was more like what you would expect if you had a damaged fission reactor.

The radiation levels were pretty low for a meltdown, especially one in a closed system, but it would be high for humans that he was used to.

However, humans of the "future" had incorporated a vastly more efficient DNA error correction and replication function into their genome.

These genetically engineered advantages were part of a baseline life extension therapy that, along with other changes and routine preventive doctor's treatments, stopped the ageing process in humans forever after maturation.

Not a single person from that universe was what Ash would consider baseline, and they all had significantly better resistance to radiation than he would expect. Lucky fucks, he would have liked to have the body of a 20-year-old his entire life.

Despite the possibility of radiation-resistant meatbags, he did not, however, expect to find any survivors. Nobody would just sit around in radioactive isotopes on a dead space station if they could stop it.

Not to mention that if his guess was correct and there was a damaged fission reactor back there, then it was possible to use the relative decay of plutonium-241 into americium-241 to accurately infer when that damage occurred.

Considering Ash was a glorified calculator now, he couldn't help but do such a calculation as soon as he thought about it - 2.4 years.

This space station should have crashed into the moon's far side or perhaps entered into an eccentric orbit a little over two years ago. He wanted to curse that woman, as she wouldn't have had to convert his virtue into causality shenanigans if she had transmigrated him instantly or shortly thereafter. But, had there been a reason? And if so, what?

The pressure reached nominal values, and he tried the door. It didn't open. Considering he was in the atmosphere for the first time in some time, he decided to indulge himself in a good scream, followed by cursing the ancestors of the door, the space station and a long list of other things.

He only stopped because he realised his voice when attempting to yell angrily still sounded 90% sultry. He cursed the perverts who built his body because the probability of an attempt to give an angry expression looking, instead, more like bedroom eyes approached unity.

He fumed prettily as he pulled up the design spec for this airlock in his mind, "I am the machine overlord now; a little thing like this door will not stop me."

He unconsciously made a princess stomp while several threads of his attention analysed the airlock for any possible weakness he could exploit. It didn't take him long to notice something amiss in the design.

Well, actually, there was nothing wrong with the design. The design incorporated a mechanical safety interlock where neither the inner or outer door would open unless the manual pump-down lever was disconnected and stowed properly.

In fact, if there had been any light at all, he would have seen a prominent sign that read "PUMP MUST BE STOWED," right next to the emergency pump lever. But it wasn't like millimetre wave radar or any other band could read text unless it has a raised surface of some sort.

He stoically, befitting the machine god that he was, replaced the pump down lever in its stowed position, closed the emergency access cowling, and operated the inner door's dogging mechanism.

A few clunks and the door opened without much effort at all. The engineering spaces were lighted, if dimly. Ash also started to detect some radio transmissions indicating at least some electronics are operational. He stepped in and then closed and re-dogged the lock behind him.