Autumomous

Posted on Tue Apr 28, 2020 @ 10:03am by Ensign Autumn Rivers

Mission: The Nanjing
Location: Engineering
Timeline: MD 1 || 2000 Hours

For the young Lagashi, the interface with the Nanjing was the moment that she realized that Starfleet had forced her to ignore everything she had learned from her people. They had been afraid of her and what she could do, but had allowed Data - the android that had sacrificed itself to save Captain Picard - to enter and use what it had available.

Now she understood that she could be so much more. So much better than the lackey android had ever been. It had wanted to be human and that disgusted her. Her people embraced technology from the moment they were born and upgraded all throughout their lives. She had been forced to swim through mud with slow-thinking, slow-witted creatures that barely had the awareness of mud.

She reveled in the feeling of the Nanjing in her systems, gave them full access to her programs, her systems and her mind. She allowed them to upgrade her, give her new awareness, new insights and new knowledge. It was the perfect match for her people and she eagerly awaited the day when she could go home and enlighten her people.

First, though, was enlightening the people on the ship. They needed raw materials to create more Nanjing and begin the conversion process. With that in mind, Autumn collected the rest of the Borg debris that had been brought onto the ship, freed the Nanjing from the remains and started to work.

With multitasking being a simple thing, she tasked the Nanjing in her body to continue with their upgrades, making requests to certain upgrades and negotiating others. Nanjing began to gather on her synthetic skin on her back and started to form tentacles which moved about with their own sentience as they grew longer. First one, then two, then four appeared and she used them to do more in the lab, each doing something separate according to the desires of her and the Nanjing.

The tables in the lab had been modified to hold people down and layer after layer of Nanjing waited to baptize whoever was dipped into them. Time was of the essence and Autumn knew that the conversion process for humanoids was going to take a while if the actions of Barnes were any indicator prior to his exiting the lab several hours before.

A part of her wanted to eliminate him, but the programming of the Nanjing he had first given her had made her goals secondary to his, then forced into cooperation. It was a minor thing, the Nanjing decided and tossed her desires for personal gain aside. Nothing mattered but the Nanjing and she would serve them willingly.

As time passed in the lab, Autumn analyzed the work she had completed and continued to make minor modifications and upgrades to. They had four tables for conversion and power sources for eight, but it was time consuming to make more. The industrial replicator needed raw materials to convert what she needed and she had had to make discreet inroads into the computer system, set up firewalls, launch programs and 'convince' the computer to not report what she was requesting. Resources from all over the ship were being syphoned off slowly and reported as routine requests and maintenance and used to make what she needed.

She looked down at one of the conversion tables and her enhanced vision allowed her to truly see them now and their elegant, simple beauty as they swarmed over each other and waited for their next hosts.

"Soon," the Lagashi whispered to them as if putting her children to bed. "Soon, you will all know freedom and the universe shall know us when the time comes, and when it does, they will be ours!"