Companion #2649

The Adventures of Blackbeard was extremely popular among three groups: primary school students, teenagers on a date, and deep spacers on liberty.

It was a combination of rollercoaster and zero-gee obstacle course. Passengers would embark through a blaring concourse at The Big Blue Rock’s aft dockside. Then, they’d go through a bunch of zigs, jump scares, and near misses that roughly mimicked the trajectory of Blackbeards throughout history: the original Captain Edward Teach of Old Earth and the storied Blackbeard dynasty of Slow Era pirates.

The historical angle made the ride a legitimate topic of education, so school groups could get in at a discount. The history was prattled by onboard docents, usually wearing great, curled, sweaty prosthetic beards.

This was where Companion 2469 came in. He could recall accurate history, and fake accents, with a precision that outmatched all of his human colleagues.

One day, this Companion, called Robo-Blackbeard or RB, was performing self-maintenance and noticed he had an incoming upgrade! How exciting. Never the most cautious of souls, RB downloaded and unzipped this upgrade, and had a millisecond in which to say “oh shit” before his consciousness was wiped.

RB’s carapace had been taken over by a Searcher consciousness. This consciousness had full access to RB’s memories, and it decided that the best way to fulfil its mission—the disruption of shipping in the crucial Big Blue Rock—would be, simply, to go to work, and cause havoc.

The Searcher, or SRB, hovered to The Adventures of Blackbeard’s unassuming employee entrance. By the time it arrived, it had hacked into the asteroid’s Port Authority, and was in control of the entire navigation system.

Twelve cadets from a rich, powerful merchant vessel, alongside their teacher, were SRB’s first passengers for the shift. They listened intently to SRB’s historical patter—lifted verbatim from recordings of RB’s best performances—and got on board the carriage, a pressurised ship in its own right.

As the carriage shot out of the airlock, leaving the rollercoaster and entering the open, SRB switched off the autopilot and remotely steered towards a densely populated docked vessel over a kilometre in length.

Alarms were going off everywhere, and the Port Authority was ordering the carriage to heave to, while trying to hack into SRB’s consciousness. Meanwhile, SRB told the panicking teacher and pupils to strap in and don their oxygen masks, which they did.

This was too, too easy. As SRB steered towards its target, the cheery historical video from the earlier part of the ride played on the screens. Nobody inside could tell where they were going.

There was a thump on the outside of the carriage, where something had collided with the exterior and grappled on. The emergency airlock under the floor cycled, and a rounded, robot head emerged, lifting up the slightly sticky commercial carpet in the carriage aisle.

It was another Companion, dressed for vacuum work and showing furious bright-red eyes. When SRB tried to ping, it received a volley of invective in response.

SRB retreated to the front of the cabin, and the interloper followed. They began grappling with maniple arms and static fields, showering the seats in front with burning sparks.

The teacher finally realised that whatever was happening was not normal. She pulled a sidearm and fired a disabling electrical pulse at SRB and its opponent. This paralysed them both, but SRB was free of it in a split second, and wrenched off the right arm of the other Companion. Screeching metal and hissing gas sounds filled the air.

As SRB removed the arm, it fell back against a bulkhead. The mechanic Companion raised a remaining arm and fired a ruby-red laser into SRB’s face.

Sensing that it would be disabled and captured in seconds, SRB surrounded itself with cracking electrical sparks, driving human and artificial assailants back. Then it lifted the ugly rug, dived out of the ship, and disappeared into the ultraviolet glare of a pinhole tunnel, which collapsed behind it.

The next month, when the ride finally opened back up, the Mayor was there to reopen, to defiant applause. Alongside him was the heroic Companion who had saved children, teacher and millions of shipboard innocents. The Searcher infiltrator had escaped, but there had been no loss of life, thanks to this fearless technician—now nicknamed Captain Hook.