Cogito Ergo Sum

• Real-Life Date: 11th - 13th of October 2024

• Stardate: 91777.2

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Starbase 777 received a distress signal from a location they had no record of in Federation space. A group of people had been trapped on “Hamar IV”, and had finally made it through to interact with someone on the outside world. While initially skeptical, the crew of Starbase 777 ran some tests and proved the signal was legitimate, so they went on board the Eventide to check it out.

The away team landed on a desolate, snowy tundra, five life forms on the planet coming up on scans, before one of them fizzed out about as soon as they landed. They found a body next to a broken crudely-fashioned communications machine, a human woman who had been strangled to death. They followed fire in the nearby caves to locate the remaining four survivors, who revealed most of their surroundings were circuits created by a massive computer known as AZRAEL, who had kept them trapped for 113 years. Their comms had been disabled, severing ties to the Eventide. 

They relocated to a cabin that appeared in the tundra, where one of the computer's creators revealed that AZRAEL had been trained off of every war that they could get their hands on in order to be the ultimate weapon. The computer “woke up” and expended that violence outwards, wiping out the colony and leaving 5 people alive to take their frustrations out on. AZRAEL appeared then to taunt the group while they scanned for a way to temporarily disable it (as it had gained sentience, and could not be shut off, as it would kill it) before retreating, all but welcoming them to its core. 

The computer core was hidden beneath the ruins of the colony, where the survivors revealed a device had been created to store AZRAEL in, but it needed to be made vulnerable first. They proceeded to the trap door into the computer core, a tangled mass of wires, where all hell broke loose. Wires were severed, the team was injured, a hand was removed, until AZRAEL was significantly weakened enough to successfully move it into the storage device. One of the survivors was fatally wounded in the process, but they regained contact with Eventide and rushed everyone up to safety.