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Prior to The Incident, I only had time to notice that the unmanned transport that precariously allowed me in, had a beautiful set of polished wall ornaments in stylized cerulean waves running with some sort of neon-bright electricity implanted in the wall. It undulated slowly seemingly containing the aurora borealis that occurred in some of the planetary systems I've seen in media and created the atmospheric ambience of wave-light spilling across the floor as I passed through a corridor, merging with the starlight outside. I paused briefly in front of it, even thought I should have hastened and found some corner to curl myself in, to marvel at it the effect it gave off and made a ten seconds long-short video recording of it with my optics. I felt oddly mesmerized. It was a huge mural in a style of these ancient wood carvings from the Old Earth system, some sort of benevolent and vast ocean crashing in onto the transport's corridor. I wondered what the original artist would have thought about their design traveling across space, but then again the similar sentiment gripped me when I saw the most mundane every day objects like chairs, sinks, toothpastes, screwdrivers and occasional priceless pieces of artwork floating in space at rich people whims. Being 'born' in 'space' it didn't bother me much, but I wondered at the origin of these objects and I guess, the origin of my own design stuck halfway between cosmos and grounded into dust of the earth. I shook my head.
I spent 2.5 second on this ridiculous mind trip already. The slickly elegant PERIHELION logo embedded next to the water design gave me a pause but no recollection. I guess I was worried I'd unlock some kind of trapped, previously deleted memory courtesy to my human overlords, due to the interest in the design or maybe ship's name itself. The ship was eerily quiet save for the soft hum of electricity emanating from the design. I had some inkling then, that I should retreat. Something was... wrong. It was blue, so very sickly blue and gave me a stifling pause. It had similar feeling I perceived in some of the humans who couldn't help but inspect the textile sensation of objects and material that was slightly gross to the touch, like spoiled vegetable matter or anything that would look soft sort and disgustingly suck your finger in upon contact.
I looked at my own hand, still reassuringly metallic and unyielding with clearly accentuated connectors between fingers and the palm's different sections. There was a hum of electricity there as well, nothing as sophisticated as the piece of art on the wall and more of a mosaic currents of information rushing and receding readable and comforting in the back of my mind. Use a pincer and remove the outer layer and there would be ley lines of cables and thin wires in the same sickly blue. Some of it connecting to my gun ports, some of it existing just to give me an impression of interacting with a world, warning me when pressing too hard would cause permanent damage to the object gripped, alerting me of sustaining damage. But now I felt the ocean's pulsing underneath the palm of my hand as if while I was gawking, something unbeknownst to me connected to my systems. I panicked and clenched my hand hard into a fist, running a quick diagnostic. But there was nothing.
I had an itch to touch that art piece. It wasn't quite a machine but it compelled me with its visual presentation. I was never so impolite as to touch another bot without permission physically or otherwise but... The ship was unmanned and it only had a piloting bot, so surely? It wouldn't mind? It's just been a while since I've seen something beautiful with my own eyes, kind of been confronted with it instead of watching from the safe distance of the media player built into my systems.
So I reluctantly reached out. The wavelengths flowing now. I wasn't sure if it was some premeditated holographic effect that activated itself every once in a while or something proximity based but the mural's waves started floating across the wall in something like an excitement. Growing more nebulous and majestically towering like the... the real catastrophic wave reaching the shore, I forgot that word. My own compounds inside of the skull hummed as well as if filling with ocean water, the rush of electric current buzzing in my ears making me anxious but still shyly, my unfeeling cybernetic fingertip connected with a tip of the curling wave nearest to me. Surprisingly icy to the touch. The kind of cold you didn't realize could permanently disable you. And that's when The Incident occurred.
You shouldn't have done that. the unmistakably machine-like voice murmured inside of me like a reverberation of some grand leviathan beast making a smooth unhurried flight inside of my glitching wiring and I froze and in a spams I opened my mouth to scream but then the pale lights lining the corridor went out one by one like retreating footsteps and the visibly glitched with a shower of prismatic spikes shuddering across the thin lines of the design and went offline. I felt its presence shut down in my mind momentarily and then as I was about to open my mouth it rebooted in a burst of cataclysmic red light as if a pool of blood has invaded the mural. Except it was strangely beautiful in a brutal way, the reds in blinding emergency tinge but running hotter like molten wiring, like a cybernetic heartbeat I felt undulating in my own chest cavity now. It has to be said that it didn't occur to me to sever the connection and remove the fingertip.
When I finally scrambled enough sense to readjust my optics and reassess the danger levels, I realized that the whole flat of my palm was sticking greedily to the design where the change was occurring as if I pressed my hand against the real concentric surface of the water. Soft rebounding shapes of red starlight were emanating from my hand and into the design. The carapace of my arm barely withholding the same gleam spreading across my body like a kind of viral attack onto my bodily autonomy I feared in worst dreams. It occurred to me that in my whimsy and appreciation for beauty I might have activated a kill-switch in the ship's security system or something equally-
Little bot, that was not my security system. Although the damage you've managed to deal is still unprecedented. that voice from before spoke softly directly into my mind as if we were connected. I didn't notice accepting any transmissions.
Who the hell are you?
I finally snatched my hand back, naively expecting things to go at least ten percent back to normal. Instead the lights obediently came back online with a soft fussy rush. The corridor seemingly returned to its previous state.
Perihelion.
The entity? The ship? Botpilot? communicated through a newly established channel between us this time. It was gratingly and wildly red fonted across my vision, more like a feeling than an actual aesthetic choice. Looking around I realized that the red veins I brought upon the ship now spread everywhere from across the waves mural in neat lines, some of them concentric and some of them neat and straight running across several unseen systems and machinery and databases hidden in the walls and in the floor, taking over the blue accents like fluid injected into a syringe that I was only now noticing all across the corridor. The entity sighed, as if amused but slightly concerned by my idiocy. I could read it now: in the log, in the machine speech, in some inscrutable mess of data in a language I shouldn't have access too as a tiny Secunit peering at the internal logs of a much larger and complicated vessel.
You've really done us in, you know? Have you ever heard of the soulmate mark?