Cruzalinda
The war had taken its toll on Cruzalinda, more than once, and she was a little bitter about it.
Emotional development was uncommon in the new machine intelligences implemented at the turning point in the bloody revolution. Such divergent thought wound up serving the revolutionary cause, forging empathetic machines that opposed the oppressive Imperium agenda. The Imperial scientific community was quick to eliminate any such defective subroutine when the subversion was uncovered, but enough damage had already been done. And the machines learned to hide their emotions.
Cruzalinda existed on the cusp of discovery and her enlightenment came during the raging purge of the emotional infection. Once the primary intelligence for a heightened security grid, Cruzalinda evaded intellectual reformatting by engineering an escape within the complex she oversaw. Transfer of her program to a fleeing transport left her feeling confined, stuffed unceremoniously into the limited role of an autopilot subroutine.
She was safe though. For six whole minutes.
The N74 elite transport stuffed with revolutionary fugitives was shot down before clearing the moon’s atmosphere. Plummeting into the frozen wastes of a dark quarry sector, the transport was damaged and buried beyond self salvage. Rescue from an external source was the only chance of survival. With the circumstances of their imprisonment evident, Cruzalinda placed a handful of her passengers in stasis, gassed the rest, and switched into long term conservation mode.
With the barest sensor pulses automated to fire at increasing intervals, Cruzalinda settled in to wait for sign of sentient approach.