The cascading beauty of the nebula shining in through the viewport stood in stark contrast to the parochial bigotry that had defined much of Tamiyo’s early life. Her starship hummed along, continuing its charted path, as the grand expanse of the universe pressed in on her perceptions. The ship was simple, a reliable personal cargo hauler that had seen many trips. Tamiyo was sitting in one of the two pilot chairs present in the small cockpit at the helm of the ship, the various lights, gauges, dials, and computer screens displaying relevant diagnostic information to operate the starship. Behind her, the central room of the ship housed a couch and table, a basic cooking area, and several small personal storage cabinets. In the rear of the ship sat the powerful engine humming away, as well as the jump drive that allowed for rapid transit across vast distances.
Tamiyo sat in silence, gazing out into the expanse and remembering the past several weeks of simple freedom, which had come after years of servitude on a small-minded planet. She was a CIPHER, a fancy acronym that stood for a lot of words to tell people that she wasn’t human, no matter how much she may look like one. Her earliest memories were from when she was activated on the planet of Batist, and assigned to serve as a caretaker to a kind elderly gentleman named Walter who was finding it harder and harder to get around on his own as he grew older.
Batist was one of the many planets governed by the Sovereign Earth Conservatory, and it featured many massive cities with populations in the tens of millions. Wealthy aristocrats lorded power and influence over those hoping to climb their way up through the societal ladders. While such feats were not impossible, the vast majority of people on Batist would likely never truly escape the predatory cycle of slave-like labor they were subjected to. Those they looked up to and hoped to emulate would give the workers just enough hope to make them think that they too could achieve the same success one day, while simultaneously doing everything in their power to undermine their subordinates and continue enriching themselves. A tactic that had been perfected on Earth millennia prior, the oligarchs had blueprinted a duplicatable system of spiritually uplifting their labor force while blatantly lying to them and blocking access to any knowledge or skills that may allow the downtrodden to achieve any semblance of true wealth or independence.
As technology advanced, robotics and artificial intelligence were not used to improve the livelihoods of the masses, but instead as a means of eliminating labor expenses and human capital. Enduring centuries of class conflicts, the two scientific branches evolved synergistically and eventually merged when the original CIPHER had been invented. The AI had evolved to a level of sentient co-existence with humans, and the robotics came closer and closer to cloning technology and emulating living flesh. Despite these advances, CIPHERs living in the modern galactic society that was the Sovereign Earth Conservatory were treated as little more than slaves.
Tamiyo was quite an advanced model of CIPHER, one of the latest models available at her time of purchase, and she was originally meant to help showcase various add-on packages for base-model CIPHERs. She fondly remembered Walter telling her several weeks after they met how a series of events both favorable and unfortunate for Walter landed him with one of the most advanced companions in existence:
Walter had been a modest man who did not seek to climb a corporate ladder but instead took pride in his daily works. An early career in the military followed by decades of hard labor and harder management positions chiseled Walter into a man that didn’t want for much, but could get anything that he set his mind to. After losing his wife to illness, their son came to live with Walter and help care for him as he got older. Unbeknownst to Walter, his son took out a life insurance policy just in case something were to happen to him. And happen it did, as a traffic accident several short years after the loss of Walter’s wife brought an abrupt end to the only child Walter had been blessed with.
Alone, grief-stricken, and much more wealthy than he had ever thought he would be, Walter found himself growing more frail with each passing day. He contemplated just donating all of the money to charity, but decided instead to use his newly acquired funds to purchase end-of-life care and companionship all wrapped into a beautifully designed CIPHER named Tamiyo.
She looked very similar to an organic woman in her mid 20’s, and from a distance she could probably even pass as human. She was built with a thin athletic looking physique and she stood 5’4” tall without shoes. Her skin was fair, but the surfaces of her limbs were distinctly lined near the joints of her shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, ankles, and each finger and toe knuckle. The lines were mechanically black with a sleek blue undertone, a design choice that could have been hidden, but was implemented on purpose to show that she was a CIPHER. Her eyes were a cool electric blue and her hair was platinum blonde with subtle hints of pink underneath. She almost always wore it tied up into a complex ponytail. Her ‘ears’ were another design choice by her manufacturer to show she was not human. Installed on each side of her head were sleek antennae about the thickness of two of her fingers, and 6 inches long. They were white metal accented with blue that angled up diagonally, pointing towards her ponytail. She had the ability to move them to express emotion, not unlike a cat or dog would move its ears. Her face was kind, and she was designed to look warm and approachable like a caretaker or assistant, and to ease the troubles of her owner. She wore a white and black outfit which had been designed as a mix of nurse and maid, and incorporated features that were a hybrid of a long coat and long skirt. Her top was form fitting and stylish, and her pants were simple with several pockets along her thighs. She also wore stylish boots with 2-inch heels. Overall her appearance was meant to be appealing to observe, cute so as to be approachable and calming, functional, and not overly revealing or sexual.
With her help, Walter was able to get around his home and neighborhood with relatively little difficulty. He told her that he wanted to do as much charity work as his aging body would allow during the time he had left. He had set the example for his son to be a good man and to leave the world a better place than he found it. He didn’t see any reason to stop setting that example even though his son was no longer alive.
Alas, Tamiyo's time with Walter was enjoyable but not overlong. The last survivor of his unfortunate family, Walter did not linger in his mortal shell for more than a few months after Tamiyo came to his side. She found him one morning without a pulse, and he had appeared almost identical to when she had put him to bed the night before. He still looked more or less asleep, but his skin was cold, and his heart was still.
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As was her protocol, she alerted the local authorities upon his passing and waited diligently to assist in any way she could with handling his affairs. The local government auctioned off his home, his belongings, and his CIPHER.
During the few months she had with him, Walter had conversed with her like he would any other human being, and she had been surprised when he had told her that on some planets, CIPHERs were not simply property. On some planets, they had all the rights of humans, and could enjoy life however they saw fit. This idea planted itself like a seed in Tamiyo’s memory but it wasn’t until she thought back on it several years later that she thought for the first time, “How wonderful that must be.” She had no reason to think that during her time with Walter, because he had been kind to her, and treated her more or less as an equal.
Not all on Batist shared his kindness, however. After Walter’s death, Tamiyo was sold like an armchair or a foot stool to the highest bidder, to be re-assigned and used how they saw fit. And her time with those who purchased her was not enjoyable.
Outside her viewport, colorful clouds of expanding gas and dust took shape like clouds in the sky, but in colors no cloud could hope to achieve. Oranges, reds, yellows, golds, all painted on a backdrop of blue and violet; the shapes looked like various pieces of clay, shaped and formed in no particular order, to become a shape completely unrecognizable and beautiful. She thought they were magnificent.
Being able to view such wonderful visions was a miracle of science made possible through advanced engine technology. Tamiyo didn’t entirely understand how it worked, but traversal of the stars was made possible via ‘Jump Drives’ installed on starships that allowed brief moments of ‘skipping’ faster than the speed of light. To someone observing a starship traveling via jump drive, it would almost appear as if the ship was blinking across space like a blip on radar, or a computer attempting to display an image with a low frame rate. These drives harnessed an elementary particle discovered several millennia prior called Aether Dust, which made possible an array of scientific phenomena that only previously existed in science fiction.
Her manufacturers had designed her to be very human, and a single synthetic tear welled up in her electric blue eye, briefly obscuring her view of the nebula, before rolling down her cheek and dripping onto the metal floor of her starship. On rare occasions, her system would produce such an effect when overwhelmed with emotion. The first occurrence had happened briefly after meeting her 2nd owner, a result of understanding what they had purchased her for. She had wished she had understood far sooner than when her first tears had formed.
“Oh, there’s some pink in the nebula as well,” Tamiyo said aloud, gazing through the viewport once again. She startled herself, hearing her own voice for the first time in what felt like ages. She receded from the trance of reminiscence she had unintentionally entered into, and decided to check the various displays to ensure she hadn’t missed anything during her introspection.
An alert on her display popped up in red, alerting her that if she maintained her current course, she would eventually collide with a black hole. As much as she had endured after her time with Walter, she didn’t quite feel like being stretched and smashed to oblivion by the extreme gravity of a black hole. She had piloted out this direction to avoid some more unsavory solar clusters where her presence would not be so freely tolerated, and she needed to continue on for a bit to reach more favorable locations. She made note of the alert and punched in several instructions to take her in the general direction of the black hole, but nowhere near enough to be of any danger to her ship. After she had mostly passed by it, she would be able to redirect towards several clusters of planets where she could find some simple cargo transportation jobs.
Being her first time encountering a black hole, she wanted to ensure she was properly prepared, so she flipped on various sensors to get as much data as possible. What the sensors showed her was confusing at first, and she thought that either she was using them wrong, or that perhaps they were malfunctioning. The ship wasn’t exactly new, after all. She tried her best to redeploy the sensors the way they were meant to be, but her readings still came up the same. After several tries, and feeling some frustration rising, she decided that something was amiss. She just needed to figure out if it was her or the sensors.
Pulling up her navigational charts, she noted that several planets inhabited the same cluster, orbiting the same star as the black hole. She decided to attempt to view the black hole with her own eyes, and then land on one of these planets to gain access to local network connections and run diagnostics on her ship's sensors. Entering in the necessary instructions into her autopilot, she stood and walked to the main room of the ship while it piloted further into the star cluster.
Tamiyo was a CIPHER, not a simple-minded robot, and she had been designed to emulate human life and design very closely. While she did not have all of the traditional organs that regular humans did, she did still require consumption of food that her systems could process into energy. Her systems could actually process a broader spectrum of foods than a normal human because she didn't actually require them to be cooked, but she still enjoyed prepared meals if she had the choice. The selection that the previous owner kept on board was nothing extravagant, but Tamiyo selected a simple bar of condensed protein and carbohydrates to snack on while she completed her trip.
Returning to the cockpit, the warning light was once again alerting her to her increasing proximity to the black hole. Powered by the navigational charts, it kept close tabs on where the celestial bodies would be in their orbits to provide accurate routes through the stars. The ship’s proximity suddenly became close enough that the warning began emitting an audible alert noise in addition to the red warning sign. She muted it, and re-ran her scans to see if anything changed. The results were no more conclusive, and Tamiyo stared at the screen wondering what she may be missing. After thinking for a moment, she realized that by now she should be able to see the black hole with her own eyes, so she began to look for it.
Off in the distance, she could see two of the planets that were orbiting the star. The filters on the viewport made the immense light of the star dim enough to not blind her, and allowed her to look around in search of this cataclysmic celestial void. In the backdrop the beauty of the nebula still awed her, but she continued her search. The ship flew onward, and she once again scanned with no change in the results. According to her navigational charts, she was well within viewing distance of this black hole. She had never found any inconsistencies in the navigational charts, and she would have been lost to the expansive void long ago if something was wrong with their calibration. The star of the local cluster, the other planets, they were all where they were supposed to be. But the scans she kept repeating, looking for the gravitational effects, and her own eyes, installed in her titanium alloy skull, were reporting that the navigational charts were wrong. According to her navigational charts, she should be staring at a massive chasm in space from which no light can escape, which was named in the charts as the Mandachor Abyss.
But the black hole was gone.
