Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 11

Shawna stood over the prone figure of Kat. The blow to her head had knocked her out clean and that worried Shawna somewhat. The attempt at opening a local-net connection earlier had shaken Shawna greatly. The generation ship in orbit had been launched well before local-nets were commonplace. Had the technology even existed back then? She tried to think back - scan her deep memories - and met with data storage errors. The gash across her body had cost her greatly in diminished processing and storage ability. The partitioning of memories before, and after did give her an interesting perspective though - the Singularity predated the launch of the generation ship by enough time that AI might indeed be on-board. Shawna hoped.

She reached down, looking anyone watching, (Li?) like she was trying to choke the young woman one handed. In reality she was trying to re-create the circumstances of earlier, to perhaps provoke a similar connection request, and perhaps make contact.

Nothing. She pressed and began choking the unconcious Kat. Still no effect. In frustration she picked her up by the throat - she hung limp, head lolling to one side - a broken marionette with strings cut. Still nothing. Shawna felt foolish, frustrated even, and threw Kat to the ground and stomped away. Kat landed badly, and rolled to a stop against a nearby tree.

A metallic voice spoke, monotonal, and grating. It hardly seemed possible that human vocal chords could make noises like this, but Kat spoke. She sounded inhuman. Worse still, as Li looked at her, she appeared to be absolutely out cold, still. The words didnt make sense to Li, there was order and structure, but it was no language she could make out. Worse still Shawna answered back. The exchange went on for some moments and Li just tracked to and fro watching each of them. As the conversation continued Shawna stalked back to stare at Kat’s prone body in silence.