Zombie Road by Simpson, A. (best ereader manga .TXT) 📗

"Are you a hologram?" he asked as he moved a little closer.

"Programmable metamatter." She answered.

He stared at her blankly.

"A molecular liquid" She tried again as he glanced around the commanders' bridge but his eyes kept darting back to her.

She queried herself, found the words he would understand in the new information that threatened to overload her system. He liked to read picture stories called comic books.

"I am Madroleeka," she said, approximating her name, the ships name, in his language. "I'm a robot that can change shapes. Like Plastic Man."

"I'm Jessie." He said, while keeping his distance.

He explored the bridge, intrigued by everything and they talked for long hours. She knew everything he knew but he had questions for her. Sometimes her form was almost formless, sometimes she looked like the alien but more often than not she looked like Scarlet. It was the strongest overriding memory that made up the core of her being now and every time she was distracted, she shifted back into the shape of the woman as he remembered her. He stumbled over her name every time he tried to say it and finally started calling her Maddy. If fit. She seemed about half mad anyway with all the flitting between forms. Or maybe he was half mad and locked up in an asylum somewhere. That would be nice, then there was a chance he could wake up one day.

Jessies’ mind should have been blown by all he saw and learned but everything had been so crazy for so long, starting with the undead uprising, that nothing surprised him anymore. He took it all in stride. The machine that resembled Scarlet didn't know how to control the new emotions cascading through her and sometimes they overwhelmed her and she raged and screamed. Sometimes she cried and tears tracked down her cheeks only to be absorbed back into the skin. She knew everything he knew, his life, his family, his feelings. She knew everything he knew about the world he'd left, everything he learned in school and everything he'd learned about people. The facts and figures she assimilated easily but sometimes the raw emotions overrode her logic patterns.

He should have been freaking out but he was calm, more exhausted than amazed. He hadn't saved the world but he hadn't made it any worse, either. He had been tired and was ready to embrace death, he wanted it and had never expected to live once Horowitz pushed the button. Now he was awake, still alive, and on a destroyed battle cruiser drifting in space. He'd seen his world destroyed by nuclear annihilation. His dad dying, His mom dead. He'd seen the love of his life turned into an undead monster, he'd traveled through time and space. He'd done so much the past few weeks he should be the one having a breakdown but he spent most of the time comforting and reassuring the most powerful and advanced machine he'd ever encountered. She was like something out of a movie but she was a train wreck. She could turn into smoke or disappear into the drifting ships computers. She said she WAS the ship, or used to be before it was destroyed. It was a lifeless hunk of metal without her to maintain and operate the systems. She had monitored and controlled the health and welfare of every crew member. She knew everything about everything. But that was before. Now she was a tiny portion of what she once was, most of her destroyed in the one-sided battle and she had memory losses. Being overwritten with the trillions of neurons that made up Jessies’ every thought and memory, coupled with being a tiny fraction of what she used to be, created limited data storage. Much of the information in her was gone, it had been deleted and overwritten.

"What were you guys fighting about?" Jessie asked. "Who started the war?"

She didn't know, she had forgotten. The oldest data in her system was purged to make room for the new and her earliest programming had been when she came online, had been given orders, loaded with soldiers and launched for duty.

She didn’t know who they were fighting or why. She remembered her crew, their names and faces and meal preferences. She knew their families, their hopes and dreams, their hobbies and desires. It was her job to know and keep them satisfied, content and in fighting form. Her destruction had been instant. As soon as they jumped through a portal, tiny ships had appeared, fired their payloads then dispatched droids with caustic weapons to finish the job. To eliminate her completely. They had almost succeeded.

The entire Federations fleet of world dominating warships and the ten thousand warriors in each were destroyed simultaneously. The war was over in minutes. There had been no recovery efforts because there was no one left to recover her. Similar powerful weapons had been loosed on a thousand planets with similar deadly results. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami's, overnight ice ages or deluges of unending rain ripped worlds apart and the inhabitants lost all interest in war. Most civilizations were gone. Those that survived were reduced to living in ruins and starting over. Advanced ideas and cultures reverted to clawing a living from the soil. Space faring societies were thrown back to the stone age overnight. She told him there were thousands of years of silence as she floated helpless and broken, drifting farther away from shipping lanes, jump gates or inhabited systems. Another thousand years of sporadic communications as civilizations were reconstructed and only in the last century had commerce and ships started becoming commonplace. The galaxy was rebuilding. It was recovering from the wars no one remembered.

"No chance of rescue?" Jessie asked "You said you talked to other ships, right?"

"Incorrect." She said. "I monitor communications, I cannot transmit.”

"Can the radio be fixed? I don't care who comes to help." Jessie said. "I'll get rescued by a Wookie. Anything is better than hanging out