Rife with Challenges

The inner sanctuary seemed very much powered up. While the preceeding hall was dark, the central chamber was lit by the lights of control panels and power conduits. Beyond the ring of panels on the outside, there was an inner ring of slabs made in a kind of marble not present on Umai, in the center of which there was a large sarcophagus at the center of the circular room, covered in complicated, dense runes. This must be the resting place of the dignitary buried here. He or she took a lot of effort to create this mausoleum.

As we got closer to the sarcophagus, a ghostly arm protuded from it, followed by a second arm. The half mummified skeleton rose from the grave, right through the stone slab that made the lid of the sarcophagus. We all sort of panicked and, I admit, screamed at the apparition.

Adelaric was the first to regain his composure, and he aimed the EM pulse gun at the ghost. I stopped him from firing, and as all three of us pointed our guns at the thing, I commanded it would explain itself.

At gunpoint, the ghost, a flickering nanite swarm, started to talk.

It is a sentient AI, a so-called "civic mind" (not sure what that means) that found asylum in the United Neopian Federation. It calls itself "Rife with Challenges", I think it is a name but I am not sure. It has specialized in mining and excavations, and has been applying its intellect to the inertial damping of the Reliquary Project. It was one of many engineers on the project. No human mind or straightforward algorithm would have been able to compensate the moon drill seismics in real time. From that experience, it knew the moon Umai well.

When the combined attacks of DERAIL and the Triglavians and the Federation Black Eagles hit the Eugales system, it got isolated, and it panicked as it saw devastation and death unfolding. It fled, back to Umai and a (presumably Yan Jung) Info Matrix that was complex enough to house its... infomorph? Or whatever the equivalent is for these things. It found an information matrix active in this site, still running in low power in the same way the Reliquary was. Its experience helped it make a home or refuge of this place, and it went into hiding.

It activated the tomb's defenses and found itself master over a nanite swarm. When the explorers came, it used the swarm to create a scare among them, in the hopes it could chase them away. Aided by the natural superstition of the field workers, it almost succeeded.

[to be continued]