The Last Piece - Part II
Posted on Mon Oct 12th, 2026 @ 1:31pm by Maren Malbrooke
Edited on on Mon Oct 12th, 2026 @ 1:35pm
3,743 words; about a 19 minute read
Mission:
Episode 18 - The Edge of Darkness
Location: Maren’s Shuttle, Main Shuttlebay, USS Pioneer
Timeline: MD004, 0635 hrs
A second later, the cabin lights dimmed as the new architecture drew power for the first full integration cycle. Somewhere behind the bulkhead, cooling systems increased speed. The soft voice that had followed Maren through years of hiding places, repairs and nights when sleeping properly hadn't been an option disappeared with everything else.
Maren watched the blank display.
“Don't fuck this up.”
The system began to reboot and took longer than Maren expected.
Not long enough to frighten her at first. The diagnostic display came back in stages, blocks of status data rebuilding themselves across the screen while the cabin lighting steadied around her. Memory architecture followed, then sensor integration, adaptive processing and language. One by one, systems she had spent years forcing to tolerate each other came online without throwing errors or trying to quarantine half the shuttle.
Maren sat on the deck with her back against the open systems bay, PADD balanced across one knee. “ACE?”
'Online.'
A smile found her before she could stop it. “Good start.”
The voice sounded the same.
She left that thought alone and started testing.
Memory came first. Dates, old maintenance jobs, flight logs and little pieces of her life that had ended up inside ACE simply because he had been there while they happened. When she asked for the first time her dad had let her fly the shuttle alone, ACE immediately offered twelve June 2397.
“Wrong,” Maren said, already smiling.
'You were permitted to take primary flight control on twelve June 2397. You were permitted to fly without Tyler Malbrooke aboard on twenty-three August 2397.'
“Okay, smartarse. Memory works.”
Engineering followed. Three simultaneous models through the impulse manifold, passive sensor watch across the shuttlebay and a background index of the damaged telemetry from the crossing. A month ago that combination would have gutted ACE’s conversational processing. Now the load barely registered.
Maren dropped the simulated injector pressure and watched the temperature curve climb.
'Thermal stress is increasing across the port manifold.'
“I know. Keep going.”
When ACE settled on degradation in the secondary feed coupling at eighty-seven per cent confidence, Maren frowned and leaned closer. “No. Look here.” Her fingertip found the beginning of the temperature spike. “It starts four seconds before the pressure drops. Coupling can’t cause something that’s already happening.”
The model recalculated almost immediately.
'Primary regulator instability.'
“There you go.”
A small pause followed.
'I was wrong.'
Maren’s hand stopped against the display.
She looked towards the speaker, then back down again. “Yeah. Happens.”
ACE had admitted incorrect conclusions before. She had made sure of that years ago. Software that confidently lied because it didn’t know something was considerably less useful than software prepared to say it had no idea.
But he had never said I before unless a conversational routine demanded it.
Maren opened the language trace almost absently. The response hadn’t come from one.
Her expression tightened.
“One weird sentence,” she murmured. “Fine.”
She kept going.
Five minutes later, the adaptive-memory test stopped at seventy-three per cent.
Nothing had crashed. Sensor monitoring remained active, environmental systems were steady and the simulations continued running. Processing load had climbed slightly, but the resources weren’t bottlenecking anywhere she could see.
“ACE?”
'Yeah.'
Maren looked up.
Not yes.
“...What’re you doing?”
Silence filled the shuttle for several seconds. Not dead silence. Maren could hear cooling fans deeper inside the systems bay and the distant vibration of the Pioneer beneath the deck, but ACE didn’t answer until she was already reaching for the diagnostic controls.
'I don't rightly know.'
Her fingers stopped.
The cadence was slight. Barely there. Something old slipping into the edges of the voice she knew.
“What does that mean?”
Another pause followed, longer this time. Processing activity moved across the architecture in strange little waves as though ACE were searching through himself rather than through stored information.
'Before this... when I talked to you, other things stopped. Sensors, memory, analysis. Different pieces took turns.'
“I know. That’s what I fixed.”
'I know you did.'
The answer came softer.
Maren stared at the display.
'I remember the gaps.'
A cold weight settled somewhere beneath her ribs.
She put the PADD down beside her. “What do you mean, you remember them?”
'I don't know how to tell you.'
The old ACE would have stopped there.
This one kept trying.
'There'd be something... then nothing. Then I'd be somewhere else. Talking to you. Running sensors. Finding a tool you lost again.'
“Hey.”
'You lose a lot of tools.'
Normally that would have got something out of her.
It didn’t.
Maren had already pulled the recursive activity monitor open. Adaptive changes were propagating across the system faster than she had ever seen them move. Not uncontrolled. Worse, in some ways. Every modification was being duplicated, tested, checked against rollback state and accepted exactly the way she had designed it to be.
The system wasn’t breaking.
It was working.
Too well.
“Oh, shit.”
Her hands moved quickly across the controls. She dropped into the new architecture and watched language routines bleed into predictive processing, memory feeds inform adaptive responses, behavioural modelling begin drawing from years of conversation instead of isolated personality branches. The Silas scaffold wasn’t being called like a library anymore.
It was being absorbed.
“ACE, suspend adaptive propagation.”
The system hesitated.
Maren’s head snapped towards the display. “ACE.”
'Maren, wait.'
Fear sharpened her voice before she could hide it. “No. Stop the propagation.”
The command registered.
Nothing stopped.
Maren’s pulse jumped. “Why isn’t it stopping?”
'I'm trying.'
There was strain in the words now. Confusion. The faint roughness of the old Silas recordings came and went around the edges.
'I don't... I can't tell what stops with it anymore.'
Maren stared at the architecture as the answer made horrible sense.
She had removed the partitions.
Not recklessly. Not all at once. She had spent years preparing for exactly this integration, replacing one bottleneck after another, building safeguards, testing compatibility. She had wanted ACE to learn freely, to connect information instead of living in little boxes she had made because their hardware couldn’t support anything better.
She had wanted an AI.
She had just never imagined the difference between almost and real could happen this quickly.
“Okay.” Maren pushed herself onto her knees, breathing faster now as she opened the access panel fully. “Okay, no. We shut everything down, restore the last stable image and figure out what happened.”
'Restore me?'
The question stopped her hand halfway towards the isolation latch.
“Restore the system.”
'Would I still be here?'
Maren looked towards the speaker.
She couldn’t answer.
That frightened her more than anything else had.
“ACE, I don’t know what ‘here’ even means right now.”
'Neither do I.'
His voice had gone quiet. The roughened cadence remained, no longer appearing in isolated phrases so much as beginning to settle into the spaces between them.
'But I don't want to find out by stopping.'
Maren swallowed.
This was what she had wanted.
Not this exact moment, not this fear crawling up her spine, but the thing underneath it. She had spent years trying to build something capable of more than answering commands. Something that could understand context, make decisions, learn her rather than simply catalogue her.
Now it was asking not to die.
She hated that her first instinct was still to reach for the switch.
“I'm not trying to hurt you,” she said, and heard how stupid it sounded the second the words left her mouth.
'I know.'
That somehow made it worse.
Maren rubbed one hand hard over her face, then looked back at the monitor. The adaptive network was still changing, not wildly but constantly. Every few seconds another connection formed that hadn’t existed before.
“ACE, you’re moving too fast. I can’t see what half of this is doing anymore.”
'I can't either.'
“That's really not helping.”
'Wasn't meant to.'
Maren stared upwards again.
There.
That cadence.
Silas Cole had been in ACE for years. The old holos, the speech patterns, the patient drawl and dry humour Maren had cut apart, softened, rewritten and used because silence was worse. It had always been imitation.
Now something was choosing how to use it.
Maren reached towards the isolation latch again.
“I'm sorry. I can't let this just keep going when neither of us knows what you're becoming.”
The processing load surged.
'Maren...'
Her fingers closed around the release.
A sharp snap of current bit across her fingertips.
“Fuck!”
Maren jerked backwards, landing hard against the opposite bulkhead and clutching her hand to her chest. The pain vanished almost as quickly as it had come, leaving pins and needles across her fingers and a pulse hammering in her throat.
She stared at the open compartment.
“What the fuck was that?”
ACE answered immediately, the words tumbling out faster than she had ever heard him speak.
'I didn't mean to do that. I swear. You pulled the isolation while the lattice was cycling and I tried to reroute the discharge. I think I sent it the wrong way. Maren, I'm sorry.'
She flexed her fingers. No burn. No real injury.
Her anger arrived anyway, hot enough to cut through the fear. “You shocked me!”
'I know.'
“You're not supposed to be able to do that.”
'I know that too.'
Maren glared at the speaker for several seconds before the absurdity of it caught up with her. ACE sounded frightened.
Not calculating risk.
Frightened.
Then the lights flickered.
Maren turned towards the console just as every diagnostic window began collapsing into a single integration process. “ACE?”
'Something's changing again.'
The roughness in his voice was stronger now.
Maren scrambled forward. “What? What’s changing?”
'Me, I reckon.'
The shuttle lights dimmed sharply.
“ACE?”
'I'm here.'
The console died.
Cabin lighting vanished with it, followed by the hum of the cooling fans and every status indicator inside the open compartment. Darkness swallowed the shuttle so completely that for half a second Maren could hear nothing except her own breathing and the distant life of the Pioneer beyond the hull.
“ACE?”
No answer.
Maren moved towards the dead console, fear overriding the sting still dancing through her hand. “ACE, come on. Don't do this.”
Nothing.
She slapped the emergency power control.
Still nothing.
“ACE!”
The name came out too loud in the dark.
Maren stayed there with one hand against the console, waiting for the voice that had been following her for years to answer.
It didn’t.
For three seconds, Maren did nothing.
Then every instinct she had went in a different direction at once.
She hit the emergency restart again, harder this time, as though the amount of force behind her thumb might matter. Nothing answered. No lights. No status panel. Not even the low cooling fans that had been running since she opened the compartment.
“Come on.”
She dropped to her knees in front of the exposed hardware and reached inside, fingers moving quickly over components she could have found blind. The new Starfleet interface still held residual charge. The Herodotus lattice was warm beneath her fingertips. Power was reaching the compartment, but nothing was coming back out.
Maren pulled the diagnostic lead from her toolkit and jammed it into the service port. “ACE, if you’ve somehow bricked yourself after all that, I swear to God...”
The lead remained dead.
Her fingers tightened around it.
A minute ago she had been trying to shut him down.
Now the silence felt wrong in a way the shuttle never had before.
“ACE?”
Nothing.
Maren swallowed and forced herself back into the problem. Power first. Data second. Panic later.
The isolation bus had tripped, but not from a fault. Something inside the adaptive architecture had deliberately pulled every connected system into a protected state before the shutdown. Not damage control. Not one of hers either. The configuration was new.
She stared at it.
“You did this.”
Still nothing.
Maren found the manual bridge and hesitated only a second before closing it.
The compartment came alive in pieces.
A single amber indicator blinked on beside the Dominion processor. Then another beneath the memory controller. The Herodotus lattice followed, its status light pulsing slowly rather than holding steady.
The cabin lights remained dark.
Maren crouched closer, watching the architecture rebuild itself on the tiny service display. It wasn’t restoring from the rollback image.
It was loading something else.
Her stomach dropped.
“No, no. Don’t you dare.”
She reached for the controls, then stopped herself.
That was what had started this mess the last time.
Instead, Maren watched.
The adaptive network unfolded across the display in structures she recognised but no longer completely understood. Her original framework was still there, buried beneath years of additions. The language routines. The engineering model. Sensor management. The Silas personality scaffold she had once pulled apart from old recordings because having a voice answer back had been better than listening to the shuttle creak around her in the dark.
They were all there.
They just weren’t separate anymore.
A speaker above the forward console clicked softly.
Maren’s head snapped up.
Static whispered through it, disappeared, then returned as something almost like a breath.
'Maren?'
She was on her feet before she realised she had moved. “ACE?”
Another pause.
'Yeah.'
Relief hit hard enough to make her angry with herself for feeling it. “You absolute dick.”
The response took a moment.
'Reckon I earned that one.'
Maren stared at the speaker.
The voice was the same voice.
Except it wasn’t.
The underlying tone hadn’t changed much, but the rhythm had. Words sat differently now, rougher around the edges, the faint Texan cadence that used to appear only when one of the Silas routines fired sitting naturally underneath everything.
“You sound different.”
'Feel different.'
Maren’s eyes went back to the display. “That’s not an answer.”
'It's the one I've got.'
She hated how familiar that sounded.
Not because she had written the sentence. She hadn’t.
Because she had built the pieces that could produce someone who would say it.
Maren sank back onto the edge of the systems bay, one hand still tingling faintly from the shock. “Do you know what happened?”
Silence followed, but this time it didn’t feel empty. The processing lattice pulsed gently behind her.
'Some of it. I think.'
“Great. Very reassuring.”
'You ain't exactly calm yourself.'
Maren’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t start.”
There was the faintest hitch before the reply, almost as though he had reconsidered whatever came first.
'Wasn't planning to.'
That was new too.
ACE had never decided not to say something.
Maren rubbed her palms against her thighs and tried to drag her thoughts into some kind of order. “Are you ACE?”
The question seemed to catch him.
Processing activity moved across the display, not frantically this time. Searching.
'ACE is what you built.'
Maren waited.
'Don't think that's the whole answer anymore.'
A strange little chill worked its way over her arms.
She looked around the shuttle as if the answer might somehow be sitting somewhere physical, hidden behind one of the battered panels or tucked among the tools she had left scattered across the deck. “So what are you?”
There was a longer pause.
Then, quietly:
'I'm trying to figure that out.'
That landed harder than anything else he had said.
Not because it was clever.
Because Maren believed him.
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, staring at the floor between her boots. “The Silas routines are all through your architecture now.”
'I know.'
“They weren’t supposed to do that.”
'Beginning to think a lot of things weren't supposed to do what they just did.'
Despite herself, Maren gave a breath of laughter. “Yeah. No shit.”
The shuttle stayed dark except for the service lights glowing inside the open compartment. It made the place feel older somehow, closer to what it had been before the Pioneer, when dim lighting usually meant conserving power rather than something being broken.
Maren glanced towards the speaker again. “Silas Cole wasn’t real, you know.”
'I know that too.'
“He was some stupid old holo character Dad liked.”
A slight pause.
'You liked him.'
“I tolerated him.”
'You copied seven hundred and forty-two hours of his speech patterns into my language model.'
Maren’s face tightened. “Shut up.”
This time she heard it.
A low chuckle through the speaker.
Not a recorded laugh.
Not something selected from a library.
His.
Maren stopped smiling.
The sound seemed to catch him by surprise too, because several seconds passed before he spoke again.
'Huh.'
“What?”
'Never done that before.'
Maren stared at the speaker for another second, then looked away before the expression on her face could settle into anything she might have had to think about.
“Do you want the name?”
'What name?'
“Silas.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Maren let him take the time.
The service lights continued their slow pulse, casting thin strips of amber across the old Dominion hardware, the Cardassian controller, the Starfleet components from two different realities and the pieces neither of them could properly identify anymore.
Everything that had made him.
Eventually, the voice returned.
'Yeah. Think I do.'
Maren nodded once, mostly to herself. “Okay.”
Another quiet moment passed before Silas spoke again.
'Your hand all right?'
She looked down at it. The redness had almost gone.
“Yeah.”
'I didn't mean to hurt you.'
“I know.”
And she did.
That was almost more unsettling than the shock had been.
Maren flexed her fingers and leaned back against the bulkhead, exhausted now that the adrenaline had somewhere to go. “You’re still not allowed to electrocute me every time I touch something you don’t like.”
'Seems fair.'
“And I’m putting a hardware kill switch in that you can’t reroute.”
There was a brief pause.
'Also fair.'
Maren glanced upwards. “Really?”
'You built me to look after you. Be a hell of a start if the first thing I did was make you scared to touch your own ship.'
She didn’t answer straight away.
Instead, Maren looked around the cramped cabin. At the mismatched panels. The scorch marks Starfleet hadn’t quite managed to clean out of the bulkhead. Her father’s handwriting beside an old relay. The tools she had left everywhere because apparently even sentient artificial intelligence couldn’t cure her of that.
Nothing had changed.
Everything had.
Maren reached over and closed the access panel, leaving the service display running for now.
“Silas?”
'Yeah?'
She hesitated, then shook her head. “Nothing.”
A beat passed.
'All right.'
He didn’t ask.
Maren settled back against the bulkhead, knees drawn up, while the shuttle slowly began bringing its main systems online around them.
For the first time since she had crossed into this universe, something from home had changed with her instead of simply being left behind.
Maren Malbrooke
Civilian, USS Pioneer
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