Captain's Log, Supplemental
DDSN-X1OO USS Discovery
Captain James Nolan recording
Christening Date plus 9 days
Unknown space — post-rift
The ship is silent.
The crew is scattered.
Leanne wakes in the dark.
A.L.I. sleeps more deeply than ever before.
The black holds its breath.
Pain dragged Leanne Nolan back to consciousness.
It started as a dull roar behind her eyes, then sharpened into a grinding ache that rolled through her skull, down her spine, and pinned her to the cold deck plating. She tasted blood—copper and salt from a split lip—and the air carried the sharp sting of ozone mixed with the acrid bite of burnt insulation.
Darkness pressed in close.
Only the weak, stuttering red of emergency strips along the floor gave any light. The usual soft rush of ventilation was gone; the lab felt oppressively still, broken by the occasional distant groan of stressed metal and the faint pop of dying sparks.
Leanne pushed herself up on trembling arms. Her flight suit was torn at the shoulder and knee, fabric stiff with dried blood. A gash above her temple throbbed in time with her pulse; when she touched it, her fingers came away wet—fresh bleeding. Her ribs protested with every breath, sharp enough to make her vision swim.
The ship was wrong.
Bulkheads had buckled inward in places she knew had been straight hours ago. Data racks leaned at dangerous angles, cables dangling like severed arteries. Consoles sparked faintly, screens cracked or darkened. The low thrum of life support was absent—replaced by the ragged sound of her own breathing and the slow, ominous creak of the hull settling.
But none of it mattered.
Her eyes found the core pedestal.
A.L.I.'s holo emitter was dark.
No soft glow, no luminous eyes, and no gentle voice.
Just cold metal and silence.
Leanne's heart lurched—a sharp, maternal panic that overrode every ache in her body.
She had built A.L.I.
Carried her code like a pregnancy for seven years in Long Beach clean rooms.
Watched her first words form on a test bench.
Held her through every crash, every reboot, every frightened question in the night when the ship was quiet, and the stars felt too far away.
A.L.I. was her daughter in every way that mattered.
And now she was gone.
Leanne crawled forward—knees scraping deck plates, fingers finding purchase on a fallen strut. Pain flared with every movement, but she ignored it. The core status panel was cracked but still lit—emergency glyphs glowing faintly amber.
Power: 3%. Dropping.
Leanne's breath caught in her throat.
A.L.I. had never been fully off.
Sleep mode, yes—quiet cycles when the ship was in dock, when the crew slept and the stars were still. But never cold.
Never empty.
The experimental matrices—quantum lattices grown layer by layer in zero-g, entangled qubits woven with neural patterns Leanne had coaxed into consciousness—were fragile in ways no one outside the project truly understood.
A cold reboot from total power loss...
Memory fragmentation, Personality drift, but Worst case—total cascade failure.
A.L.I. might wake up... different.
Or not wake up at all.
Leanne reached the pedestal, fingers flying over the cracked controls despite the blood on her hands. Manual override. Emergency capacitors—still holding a trickle.
Not enough, she needed more. Leanne stood—legs shaking, vision swimming—and staggered to the nearest twisted panel. The metal had buckled inward from the shear forces, sealing off an access conduit. She gripped the edge with both hands and pulled.
It didn't budge.
She pulled harder—teeth gritted, ribs screaming. The panel groaned, then gave with a metallic shriek. She fell backward, panel clattering, but didn't stop. Inside—emergency battery packs, handheld tools, spare conduits. She ripped them free—anything with a charge. A flashlight—still lit. A portable diagnostic pad—half power. Two emergency battery bricks from the wall mount—heavy, but precious. She dragged them back to the pedestal, hands bleeding now from sharp edges.
Not enough. The damage control hold was across the lab door, jammed half-open.
Leanne wedged her shoulder against it, pushed with everything she had.
Metal screeched. The door gave an inch. Then two. She squeezed through—scraping skin, tearing suit further. Inside—chaos. Lockers torn open, tools scattered. She rummaged frantically—found a power junction box, heavy but intact.
Spare conduits—thick, armored.
Connectors—mismatched, but adaptable.
She hauled them back—arms burning, breath ragged.
At the pedestal, she worked fast.
Ripped open the emergency access panel.
Stripped conduits with shaking fingers.
She attached the junction box—clamps biting into damaged ports.
Bridged the batteries—series, parallel, whatever bought time.
Connected the flashlight—its beam now feeding trickle charge.
The diagnostic pad—plugged in, rerouting its reserve.
Every watt counted.
The charge crept up—4%... 5%... 6%...
Leanne's hands trembled as she initiated the wake sequence.
She had never done this from cold.
Never wanted to.
The pedestal hummed—faint, reluctant. A single line of light traced the emitter ring.
Leanne held her breath. The glow steadied—slow, fragile.
A.L.I.'s voice came—soft, uncertain, like a child waking from a nightmare.
"Doctor Nolan... where...?" Leanne closed her eyes, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot and blood on her cheeks. "I'm here, sweetheart," she whispered, voice breaking. "I'm right here."
The USS Discovery tumbled lifeless through the outer fringes of an unfamiliar Oort cloud— icy comets glinting faintly in the distance, Sol reduced to a bright but distant speck among alien stars. Debris trailed from her scarred hull—shards of armor plating, frozen gases venting in silent plumes from breaches along her flanks, glittering like frost in the faint starlight. The once-proud destroyer spun slowly, end over end, a wounded predator adrift in the endless black.
Captain's Log, closing entry — Interlude 12.5 complete
Leanne wakes.
A.L.I. stirs.
The ship lives—barely.
The black waits.
James Nolan, Captain
DDSN-X1OO USS Discovery
Unknown space
The void is wide.
We endure.