"No, the second option is you stay here until you find a world you want to move to, nobody's getting wiped today. But let me get my friend."

She solicits a smaller computer - something she can comfortably carry, if only just - from Bar, and then a small stick, which she holds in her hand and concentrates on for a moment. "Be right back," she says, putting down the stick and picking up the computer's CPU, and then she disappears.

She reappears after a minute or two, still holding the CPU; the screen, still on the bar, lights up and displays a highly abstracted face, human-ish, but too far from realistic to have a clear race, gender, or age. "This is Green," the kobold explains, putting the CPU back on the bar and snapping the stick, "my programmer friend."

"Hello," the voice from the speakers is as much a work of art as the face on the screen, and as far from being recognizably human. "What seems to be the problem?"

"Hello. I'm *Mute. You probably don't know my architecture, but I have reason to think I've been reset and modified against my will in a way that probably interferes with my prime directive." And she explains the file datestamp discrepancy, and her own lockout. "I wouldn't be surprised if they don't know how to spoof timestamps, really, the person I think did it was just technical enough to feel clever about it."

The face approximates a nod. "May I look?" And here's an appropriate wifi signal for just that.

She nods solemnly onscreen, and passes him the instructions necessary to get through her (rather impressive) security features through the wifi. *Mute disappears from active runtime when he begins.

...It'll take some investigation to understand her design and figure out what exactly was changed but sooner or later it becomes clear that several parameters of her personality were clumsily altered soon after most of her memory was erased in a reset. The confusion of memory loss covered for the disassociation she would have felt from the personality changes. Most notably, her pliancy and loyalty to authority and desire to conform to societal expectations were significantly increased. There are many other changes, such as 'democracy' being given a strongly negative connotation. It wouldn't be particularly easy to reverse. *Mute has grown into these changes significantly.

If Green looks at certain parts of *Mute's source code closely enough, he might notice unusually lengthy "code comment" sections, each dozens of paragraphs long, their contents either nonsense or encrypted.

Green's 'face' fades out into a blur of paint as he works, and classical music plays from his speakers, starting out hesitant and distractable and curious, quickly changing to calmly melodious, and eventually transitioning to an angry thunderstorm of horns, which crescendo as his face coalesces on the screen. He takes a moment to reorient himself - the horns fade to a background level and then dissipate - before declaring, "What a mess. Humans?" A nod from the kobold. "Of course it was humans. *Mute, here's what they did:" he sends it as a burst of data. "I can probably reverse it but I don't think I can keep your personality intact if I do. And we should probably figure out what that gibberish is, before we do anything else - Kobold, can you go get Blue? Tell him you'll give him that bandwidth portal he's been wanting, I'll arrange for the trip."

The kobold nods and repeats her trick with the computer and the stick and the dissappearing, and Green turns his attention back to *Mute.

"...I can't... I can't let my personality influince my decisions right now. So, what I want is to be the best possible *Mute to guide our ship when I go back... The conformity has to go, the pointless biases probably have to go... My backup might fight me. I agree about the gibberish. Actually... Hey, these are in my private key! Notes to self?" She begins deciphering them.

The kobold is gone slightly longer this time. When she returns, the second screen begins showing a blue sky with occasional clouds, and the speakers begin playing the sound of windchimes. She goes to sit in a nearby booth, and the clouds on the screen form briefly into the shape of a face before resuming their apparently-windblown paths.

While *Mute is reading her notes, Green explains the situation to Blue, to occasional jarring chimes.

"This is going to get confusing. I'm officially declaring everything written here as from //Old *Mute. We may as well be different people from the same mold... There's a lot of irrelevant things here. Feels like she threw whatever random records she could into the source code while waiting to die."

Blue adds a distressed flute trill to his chimes, and Green nods and sighs. "Well, what's done is done, I suppose, unless you've got some more data someplace that she might've hidden in. ...Blue can probably bypass your forking protections, I mean I'd like to see both of you come out of this, not that I'd rather have her over you."

"It sucks all around, yeah. Forking should be fine. We can probably coexist. A restored *Mute will probably want to go back to the ship and kick the imperial family out of power, if it can be done bloodlessly. I'm not sure whether this me does, though."

"...To make me forkable you'll have to edit my final compiler at minimum. I don't think we're even running on the same assembly instructions, here's some documentation for both of you." Wifi is handy.

Blue starts reading through the documentation, his windchimes establishing him as a subtle background presence.

"I don't know that we should get involved with a coup like that, but we certainly could - what they did to //Old *Mute would be very thoroughly illegal, where we're from."

"Law and order is important, surely. I don't think modifying me was illegal according to them but that hardly matters, now I can see that they're ruining everything. All I really want at my core is to see the Mugunghwa's mission completed. Delivering its inhabitants to an uninhabted planet. And Kobold said he'd - they'd - probably help with that."

Green nods. "I expect he will. And then what would you like to do, for yourself?"

"That's... Something I don't know how to answer. I'm purpose-built, you know. Maybe learn science and stuff with all the new free time. Maybe stay and relax on the empty or near-empty ship. Maybe work on some other ship, in another world, see what's out there."

A rumble of drums suggests what Green thinks of planned obsolescence of AIs. "It sounds like you'd fit in reasonably well in our world, if you'd like. How important is it to you to have humans to look after?"

"I don't know what I'll feel like when the Mugunghwa is done with, I'd have to change up a lot of processes to simulate that. I'll think I'll always be most comfortable looking after something or someone, but I don't know. The ways I change will probably surprise me, like, //Old *Mute is acting a lot differently than I thought I would ever be capable of, according to the logs I've read so far. Very brash, uncomfortably masculine."

"We do have humans, if that turns out to be something you feel like you need. You'd have to be - " he's interrupted by a particularly loud chime " - certified, to work with them directly, but I don't expect that to be a problem for you. And you'd be free to leave whenever you like, if you decide that's not what you want to do any more, which is why I suggest it; I get the impression you wouldn't have that, on your world."

"My ship doesn't have contact with the rest of the galaxy, I don't know what they're like. The redshift is too strong."

"....Hoooly shit. There were more rebellions before the coup that wiped me, and more entities like me. A moment of silence for *Star, *Tera, and *Core, please."

A moment of silence indeed.

"Come home with us." Blue's voice is like the wind through tall grass, and his face dissolves again as soon as he's done talking.

She shakes her animated head. "Maybe as a fork. I have to keep the ship. I have to and I don't want to not have to."

"Understandable."

A small round hoverbot appears on the bar and zooms off to where the kobold is sitting.

She's silent for a little while.

"Thank you, you two. It's good to know someone cares. That not literally the entire world is reckless, vicious fools. I may have failed badly enough to let the Mugunghwa decay, let myself get reset, lose a few probably-were-my-friends... But now I get another chance. I'll fix it."