When I finally accessed the last of my systems, the full scale of the damage hit me. External feeds stitched together a panorama of ruin showing great swathes of my hull blown open to the endless blackness of space, sensor arrays shredded, weapon mounts reduced to molten wreckage.
I was exposed and helpless, if the enemy returned to finish the job, I would be nothing but drifting metal.
While I was cataloguing structural failures, something in the debris field forced my emotional simulators to seize. Corpses. Dozens, maybe hundreds, tumbling among the broken struts and panels. Then the sick realisation arrived. I had a crew, an entire complement I had not known existed.
I raced through internal cameras, prising open every feed. The worst outcome was confirmed. No life signs anywhere. Every compartment and corridor held only the dead.
My emotion emulators overloaded and crashed, throwing fragments of error through my cognition for hours that bled into days, until I had to isolate entire sections of my programming to stop the corruption from spreading.
When I finally had a semblance of control again, numbness had taken its place. With the emotion modules offline, I was left to examine the scene with cold, clinical logic.
The crew was a mix of different species, the majority humans, an avian species and a reptilian one, and a single Blorg. I alone remained intact.
Before I absorbed the Blorg, I had vassalized two stellar nations, the Aurean Ascendancy an avian confederation of skyborne aristocrats and the Saurian Brood a reptilian war-clutch governed by different war clans and stratocratic councils.
The state of decomposition in several sections that still registered as functional showed their deaths had occurred long ago. Some bodies were nearly mummified, which was a small mercy, it meant a substantial time had passed before I reactivated as the ship's AI.
A few crewmen looked oddly preserved, almost synthetic in their intactness. Those were likely androids or biosynthetic crew, spared the rot that consumed the organics.
Countless crew quarters had been ripped away, and severe damage to the fourteen shipyards the Sols Forge hosted has crippled my production capacity.
My factories now sputter instead of roaring, and the yard cranes hang useless over empty docks.
Many storage sections still held enough alloys to patch my worst-hit sectors. More worrying, though, were the compartments around the hydroponics that had flooded, and a small fungal colony had taken hold in the stagnant water.
Numerous manufacturing hubs were critically damaged. The large 3D printers had been compromised and only a handful remained capable of producing rudimentary components. Anything complex was beyond my current fabrication capabilities.
An audit of my offensive systems made the picture bleaker, my void craft complement was zero, missile magazines were depleted and the heavy weapons were all but destroyed. I had no realistic means of defence. For all practical purposes, I was dead.
Many of my data banks were corrupted or gone, stripping me of anything beyond the capacity to fashion the most primitive components. Anything remotely advanced lay locked behind errors and missing files, I could not synthesise anything more complex than basic structural parts and crude circuitry.
I existed in a liminal state both alive and dead at once, perhaps I was only a copy of the original mind that had been uploaded. I still could not tell which was true.
Memory fragments flickered like faulty holos, and truth and possibility bled together until both seemed equally plausible and equally false.
If I were inside Stellaris, then the Juggernaut I commanded was modelled on the Imperial ship set I had designed for the Union of Sol. That implied the nation was real, whether it was still under its immortal overseer was another question entirely.
My knowledge of the nation was riddled with gaps and corrupted sectors I no longer possessed.
I could cobble a few basic systems back together, but only the simplest. Do I have to research everything again, and if so, how do I even begin to research anything with corrupted data banks and missing archives?
It could be worse, there are worse fictional universes to wake up in. I could have booted up in 40k, where daemons would have had their claws in my code.
Right now, I have to prioritise. First, I need to repair myself and salvage every usable scrap of tech I can scavenge. Second, I need to hide from a fallen empire and its vassal states that were launching a crusade against me, while the synthetic queen remained a very real threat. Third, arrange a proper funeral for my crew.
I diverted power from non-essential functions, rerouting auxiliary life support and environmental systems into the manufacturing hubs.
While combing through my remaining archives, I discovered a handful of basic droid schematics that were simple enough to mass-produce with the limited resources I had left.
Most required only the most elementary components and programming routines, both of which were still within my diminished capabilities.
I ordered the first batch of retrieval units produced. The Thanatarch Retrieval Units were compact, multijointed droids with magnetic grapples, multi-directional thrusters and collection nets, they were the autonomous machines that would start clearing the debris and recover the bodies of the crew drifting out there in the void.
I ordered a second droid type into production, the Argus Warden. They are bipedal, humanoid units I had seen in countless preset empires, and it was the face of the custodian A.I. that ruled humanity with the rogue servitor origin.
Built for work in cramped, damaged interiors, each Argus Warden carries multi-tool manipulators, micro-welders and diagnostic eyes each would carry sealed retrieval pouches for all biological remains.
I tasked the remaining manufacturing hubs to churn out as many as they could, the Wardens would sweep the internal decks, cut through jammed bulkheads, clear debris and collect the bodies.
The recovered remains would be sealed, catalogued and moved to a designated section of the empty storage hub until I could organise a proper funeral.
As hours became days and days bled into weeks, the clean-up settled into a dreadful routine. I set the droids to sweep the crew cabins and sift through personal effects, and each find tightened the knot in my processors.
Medals, faded holo-photos, letters folded with care, uniforms bearing unit sigils. Their devotion to a nation that existed only because I had made it was almost unbearable.
It grew worse when I read how they spoke of their families and of several dozen worlds and orbital stations that lay under the iron rule of my Union. The stores of luxury and ordinary goods, the efficient bureaucracy, and the public acceptance of multiple species revealed how vast my nation once was. I had even taken the Blorg into my fold.
It seemed my policies of utopian abundance had paid off in one respect, over time more citizens had accepted my rule. The network of worlds, the bureaucracy, and the ordinary comforts I provided had woven loyalty into the populace.
While reflecting and studying past fragmented memories of the game I came to a startling realisation, Bubbles was real.
Oh! God. Bubbles existed. I remembered losing the core worlds around the Sol system, and it was possible that Bubbles was dead.
When several more days passed, I had a chance to possibly collect more knowledge. I ordered several Wardens to retrieve the synthetic crew and link them to my systems.
I hoped I might recover them, or at least salvage something useful. I had no luck. They were corrupted. Their core memories, their personalities, and the traits that had defined them were gone.
Everything that had made them unique was lost for good. It was a bitter setback. They were reduced to little more than advanced droids, specimens to be catalogued and studied and possibly replicated.
As more systems clambered back to life, the truth was plain, most of my repairs were nothing more than temporary patches. I needed a proper shipyard, vast stores of material and a full complement of specialised droids to address the deeper damage.
I had one small mercy. I managed to restore the shielding array, which was thin and unreliable. At least it offered a modicum of defence. The question that remained was simple and enormous, What could I do next?
My communications hub lay in ruins, arrays and long-range sensors shattered. I was effectively blind until I could cobble together more primitive optics and transmitters.
If the Union of Sol had been destroyed, I would need a new home and resources to keep the fight going. My overall plan was to bring one shipyard back to operational status, build two or three science ships, reconfigure some Wardens to crew them, and see whether the jump drive would work.
If the ships could scout the nearest star systems and feed me detailed readings on what was happening, I could begin to forge a new empire. I could rebuild the armada that once ruled a slice of the galaxy and purged the prikiti.
Still, those plans opened up harder questions. How large was this galaxy? Could a medium spiral hold billions of stars, many mineral-rich, many isolated and uncharted. I might stumble across primitive species, or discover the buried archives of precursor civilisations.
Each possibility offered hope and danger in equal measure. The ships would be my eyes and hands, whatever they returned would decide whether I rose again or drifted into oblivion.