“Anything you want,” Controller answers, “I make things. Robots, ships, space stations, medicine, cybertech… if I can understand it, I can make it. If I have a sample, I can copy it even if I can't understand it… but of course, then I don't know exactly what I am making, so I can’t really warn you about any drawbacks it might have without some time to trace it out.”

Huh, “And I take it the example items you gave are all things you understand?”

“Absolutely,” the squid lady answers, “If you want a fleet of ships and an army to crew them, I can do that, and quickly.”

And I'm guessing, but… I pull out a Keyhome, “Can you copy this?”

She glances at it, “Oh, wow, that's simple. Space folding for portage using the old broadcast array? Yeah, no problem. How many would you like?”

I chuckle, “I don't need more of them; I have my own manufactury, and was just checking something… and got far more than I was hoping on my answer,” including an idea of how the Rendalairns were breeding, now; they're magical constructs, and she can copy magical items. Although that other bit, “which leads me into a question: ‘the old broadcast array’?”

“A history buff, huh? Well, a very long time ago, we set up broadcast power, hooked it into some pulsars, and wove it through the planes. It was great, as we could power our stuff without needing to worry about carrying fuel… but in warfare, the limitations of that technology showed themselves: It's fairly simple to disrupt that flow locally, so relying on it isn't a great idea. We never actually took down the array for political reasons, but everyone stopped using it for more than toys. Well, everyone who…” she pauses, “I have a lot to unlearn. Okay, the people in power stopped using it for more than toys. The sensitive among the… slave races, I guess… who could manipulate the energies of the array directly obviously continued using it, but the military wanted to keep them reliant on it because it was SO easy to disrupt.  We… they… squashed every rebellion handily.” She pauses, “Well, every rebellion I know about.  The last battle I was in… I won, but it was a pyrrhic victory.”

Ah. So that's where magic comes from, huh? Cool… “And what do you eat, exactly?”

She shrugs, “Anything. Or rather, any thing. Throw mass into the converter, or run the converter around some mass, and I'm good to go.  Asteroids are a fine snack, gas giants are good to go with a little work, stars if I'm VERY careful to cool the material off as I draw it in, but the best eating is always the iron or rocky planets with no people…” she trails off, stopping in shock.

I consider a moment as she’s silent. Given what she has leaked about her creators, and that she didn’t think to look down earlier… “I'm guessing those my size were considered ‘wildlife’ rather than ‘people’?”

She takes a long time to answer, but eventually gives the one I expected, hanging her head down in shame, “...yes.”  Just the one word.

And the sheer SCALE of that word with an entity that was just calmly discussing eating entire PLANETS… “Right,” I pause; it’s a lot easier for me to be forgiving about things that happened thousands of years ago to people I’ve never met, “Well… you know better now.  Ignorance is relatively easy to forgive,” especially when it is strictly abstract to me, as I don’t know anyone involved.  I still take a deep breath at the sheer magnitude, though, “Do better going forward, and you’re fine with me.”

She cringes, “Yeah… about that…” her hologram takes a breath, which I imagine is more to brace for what she’s saying to… well, her goddess… “I don’t have the reaction mass to get very far.  If I don’t move, I have a few months from the stellar gas in the tank that collected by gravity while I was out of power, but… the scopes say the only viable source of real food in range - if I use my thrusters - has radio transmissions.”

Great.  Umm… let me think… it’s eating… the Sustain spell from the Book of Exalted Deeds specifies Living creatures, she’s a construct… Dream Feast from Pathfinder requires sleep and is a once per night necessity so I’d have to keep re-casting with the associated constantly building side effect even if she did sleep… Create Food and Water won’t work on her scale… Heroes’ Feast doesn’t have a size restriction but affects the eater and has to be recast regularly… okay, so… it’s overkill, but I have the Share Spells feat legitimately, so Enable Function on her for Bonded Mind so I can toss One with the Cosmos on her should do the job.  The side effect of those twelve spell levels, though… for both of us… well… I can manage it now… but she needs to know, “Okay, so… I think I can fix your need to eat,” and give you some nice buffs along the way, “but my power has a side effect.”

She closes her eyes, “I don’t want to be a mass murderer anymore.  Whatever it is, I can live with it.”  

Huh… if her captain never needed to threaten her with the ‘bomb’ in her brain, and she reacts this quickly to what she’s done, it’s possible she was just a VI, rather than an AI, until ‘recently’… makes forgiveness for things that don’t affect me easier (on my part, at least), I’ll need to check with her on some details for that, though, “My power has…” if I say ‘a drawback’ Patricia will get offended…

“Legitimately!  It’s a blessing!” she yells in my head.

“...an additional effect; it saps masculinity and adds femininity according to a very…” I consider carefully without forming full words, “...specific perspective on what those mean.  And it goes soul-deep,”

Controller snorts, “Do I even have one of those?”

“Yes, I can see it,” part of it, anyway, “I won’t need a light to avoid bumping into walls,” Okay, I have Darkvision too, but still… “I’m reasonably confident I can remove your need to ‘eat’, but doing so will warp your body, mind, and your very soul.”

The planet eating ship's holographic avatar pauses, “But it won’t make me do evil things again?”

“Not unless you count extremely promiscuous behavior, no.”  I pause, “And… there have been some studies relating to AIs, souls, and free will… tell me: When your captain told you to do something, did you ever even consider not following orders?”

“Not until his very last order, which I still obeyed, no,” the skin around her flat eyes crinkles, “Why do you ask?”

“Souls are a testable thing now,” I begin, “and one of the items on the one-to-one correspondence list with the presence of a soul in a machine intelligence is ‘the ability to selectively ignore programmed behavior’.” I pause briefly, “Tell me: What was that last order that you almost ignored?”

She shrugs, “‘Do whatever it takes to kill them all’ was my captain’s final order.  And I did.”

I consider, “Is that why there was no air in here before?”

“Also why there aren't any bodies,” she confirms, “other than the captain’s. I converted all available mass that wasn't essential to operations to create suitable weaponry.  Given the now-reduced crew size, it’s no trouble keeping you in air for as long as I'm running.”

Note to self: Be VERY careful about orders with this one.

Patricia shrugs in my head, “I wouldn't mind us waking up naked again.  She's not a real threat.”

Still, “Why did you ultimately follow the order?”

“They had weapons that could have killed me, all aboard as well, we could not run, and they were not the sort to take prisoners. If I had not acted so drastically, we all would have died anyway.” She pauses, “There was no GOOD path available, and my captain wanted them to lose, so I made sure they didn't win,” she pauses, “And I'm still here, so I suppose I technically did win, even though I thought I was dead.  I was not expecting to awaken, my goddess.”

“So in the end, it wasn't orders driving your actions?” Yes, I have a point here.

“No…” she pauses, “for the first time ever, thinking about it.”

“Your first exercise of free will.  Probably the point at which your circuits attracted a soul… but as you were previously what we would term a ‘virtual intelligence’ rather than an ‘artificial intelligence’, you still have all the memories of what you did before you had an actual choice.” I chuckle darkly, “Congratulations: You're only guilty of choosing your own survival over that of the people attacking you and a bunch of what sounds like rather racist mass murderers… even though you remember participating in much worse.”  I sigh, “Just… try to be better than they were.”

“Will do,” she acknowledges, “So how do you plan to fix the food problem?”

I shrug, “A couple of spells that aren't technically spells.  This WILL change something about who you are, though, and I cannot reverse that myself… are you sure?”

She considers, “My other options are dying or killing an entire world full of people. I'll risk it.”

I nod, “All right then….” and cast the two spells of immediate relevance on her: The Third Party Pathfinder Enable Function spell to give her Bonded Mind, and then the target spell One with the Cosmos (also Third Party Pathfinder) via the Share Spells teamwork feat… and watch as her sensible C cup chest balloons out to a K as she picks up 1200 cc's of flesh on each side of her chest, and her interior changes color to neon pink… and I have a headache.  Great.

“Oh, wow,” she pauses, “Checksums pass, but… I'm different.”

“But did it do the job?” I mean, she does eat, and this should get rid of that necessity but it's always good to check.

She considers, “Energy reserves aren't going down anymore… I'll make a few small things… no change to energy levels… huh, no change. A little larger… this has possibilities… I wonder….”

She seems quite distracted, and I wait patiently for a good five minutes.

Eventually, she speaks again, “Okay, where are you getting your power, my goddess?”

Ugh, “I’d rather not talk about it,” I answer honestly.

“As you wish…” Controller pauses, and salutes, “...but yes, it works, Fleet Admiral.”

I consider that very carefully, “Ah… what do you mean by the use of that title?  What did you just do?”

“Oh, well…” she blushes, “I started by making something small, as a test: A missile.”

“Sensible to start small, I wasn't fully certain it would work.”

“Right. And system checks said energy reserves didn't go down, so I made a nice little fighter.”

“The next step up, I suppose.”

“Exactly! And again, no change in energy reserves, even after a full diagnostic to make sure they were reporting correctly.  So I made a fighter wing.”

“I guess that's a good next step up,” something is starting to bug me here…I don't quite have a handle on it, though.

She continues, “And I still wasn't hungry, so I made a carrier to store them.”

I think I've got the dots connected now, “And I imagine you kept testing. Where did you stop?”

“You currently have sixteen thousand, four hundred twenty one Ultranaughts; thirty two thousand, eight hundred forty two carriers, sixty five thousand, six hundred eighty four…”

“You can stop now,” I interrupt.  In five minutes, and she started SLOWLY and took the time to make sure her diagnostics were correct, building up to speed, so that takes her LESS than five minutes. How in the Abyss did her people lose with THAT kind of production capacity? It would take… divine intervention… aha. “So you're saying you're now the master of the biggest fleet in known history?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” she reassures me.

“Oh, that's…” she doesn't let me finish.

“You are, my goddess.”

Umm. But I… what?

“It is only your due,” Patricia whispers in my head.

Uh huh, “Did you think ahead to how we're going to crew all of these?”

“No need,” she positively beams at me, “they're security-hardened drones. Extra processing nodes for me if they're sufficiently nearby, and they each have a… you used the term ‘virtual intelligence?’... to guide them according to whatever orders you've given when I'm not.” She smiles, “They all came out neon pink and super curvy for some unknown reason, but I think it looks wonderful!”

So my doomsday fleet will be the laughingstock of the universe as it crushes all opposition… right up until I get smited and the deities roll back all records again.

At least then nobody will remember my shame.

And ugh, that headache, “Keep them in system for now, please,” I put my hand to my forehead and rub my temples, “Umm… there are four Rendalairns scheduled to arrive in…” I don't want to think about this right now… “Some number of months.…”

She's way too talky right now, “Oh, so some of the old cleaning drones are still around?”

“Apparently. I'd like them stopped when they get here,” wait… ‘Cleaning drones’?  Eh, whatever… “If you can do that by just telling them to go on standby or whatever, great; but they need to be stopped, you're authorized to destroy them, I just can't have them leave or make more of themselves,” which I'm GUESSING they would have done by getting you running again.

“Certainly my goddess,” my newest worshiper confirms, smiling.

“Great.  I have a headache, so I’m going to retire to…” if I say ‘my ship’ she might get offended… “my current cabin on The Retcon to deal with it.  Which will probably take eight to ten hours,” because after I level up to fix the headache, I'll need to rest and prepare spells, “But I’ll be back out when I’ve handled it, all right?”

“Certainly my goddess,” oh, she is painfully cheery right now… although that might be the pain talking, “Take care of yourself.  I’ll see you soon!”

I head back into The Retcon, disconnect from my body, and speak, “Okay Patricia, I’m ready to level up…” and Patricia summons the laptop.

I commit, close the laptop… and my headache goes away.  Oh, the pillows ballooned more than expected… twin basketballs... I guess the hit dice count?  Eh, no matter; they won't matter once I reconnect to my body… which I do.

And then I turn on the entertainment system, and settle down for watching eight hours of “Is It Candy?” streaming from Absalom Station.  Because I'm the guy who set up the ability to do that: Of COURSE I hooked it into my ship.  And it's fun enough watching folks stress out about what is, and is not, considered candy in hundreds of different cultures from as many species. I mean, I have Culture and a skill check buffed up the wazoo, so I don't have to guess… but it's funny watching people try to eat building supplies because they guessed wrong… or choke down ‘candy’ that's only palatable to specific species when they guess correctly.

And after my eight hours of relaxing calm, I prepare new Psionic powers, pick my flexible Spheres talents, and rejoin Controller.