Markov

The probe slowly gathered speed as it began it's long journey. The exhaust from it's massive fusion engine was shrouded by a tail of streamers designed to reduce the probe's signature and to recycle the light the hot gases emitted as power for the probe's many on board systems.

For several days it barely seemed to move but as it dived below the plane of the ecliptic it rapidly shrank to a barely visible dot of light which also disappeared after a week or so when the main engine swung away from Markov. It continued to accelerate inexorably as it slowly curved back up towards Saturn.

Periodically big chunks of the converted proto-comet flaked off under the enormous stress and were quickly left behind in the darkness. Eventually it was pointed almost exactly at Saturn and the giant engine cuts out.

The universe seemed to hold it's breath for what seemed like an age whilst the speck in the dark grew to a spark and then a light and finally the familiar winking eye of the ringed giant. An inflection point is reached as Saturn's huge gravity takes hold and suddenly it is rushing towards the tiny lump of dark rock, filling the whole sky with terrifying rapidity.

In the blink of an eye it is over, a journey that began nearly two months previously, the Hill sphere is pierced and in under an hour Saturn is reached, the proto-comet surrenders to enormous tidal forces by splitting into two unequal parts. The larger slides past the former Deity in under ten seconds and is fired up out of the ecliptic like a baseball from a batting machine. The smaller piece ploughs through the upper atmosphere and bursts out the other side, glowing like a coal, into an orbit that will cause it to drift into one of the many coloured rings as so many millions of it's predecessors have done over the aeons.

Sensor-nets, tweaked by such an unnaturally fast object ploughing through the system, were swift to spot the emergency beacon that began broadcasting as the darkening cinder began to cool. Automated rescue bots performed a graceful slow motion ballet for over an hour.

Eventually the lump of cometary rock was dragged aboard an atmospheric skimmer and medical personnel began to examine this strange visitor. Some tiny change, perhaps atmosphere or temperature triggers a tiny sensor. The rock starts to boil and steam, tiny streams of dust flow from newly apparent cracks in it's surface as nanites dissect it from within to reveal some sort of exotic survival bubble.

Medics cautiously approach, querying medical sensors whose interfaces start to appear in the mesh. An iris opens and the arm and shoulder, dripping with acceleration gel, of a vac-suit flop into view. A head rises and the arm opens the suit's visor to reveal a red-haired human female.

'G'day mates, name's Rebel, I don't feel too good.'

And then she died.

Her memory was badly damaged and the emergency pod had little useful data. The best the Plurality could determine she was hitching a lift on an unusual proto-comet being shipped in-system for research. AGI modelling suggested that combined failures of both navigation and propulsion could have caused the strap on booster to drive the comet through the wrong system at twice it's intended speed. No definite conclusions could be reached and a week later what appeared to be a catastrophic engine failure tore the remains of the proto-comet to pieces.

Her morph spent a month in the tank and her Ego spent a month in and out of an old busted up clank working off her debt to the Plurality.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark was apparently a crackerjack Wet-programmer and a wizard at programming nano-fabricators so she did not have any trouble building up a decent Rep but all her skills were worthless in recovering the massive chunks of her identity she had lost. She knew her name and knew that she was a spacer that grew up in the Kuiper Belt but nothing else, not even fragments.

She combed through her own Ego with all the Psychosurgical tools at her disposal and came up blank. The memories weren't damaged, they were just gone.

She did learn a lot about herself though. Her neural tree had been altered by someone even more skilled than herself. She could see vague shapes in her mental structures that meant something but she didn't know what. She did know that she was blocked from altering them, in fact she seemed to be unusually resistant to divergence. None of her forks ever displayed any desire to change it's core personality. They got twitchy after four hours without a merge and after a week they were verging on mono-mania.

Whenever her mind wandered her hands were busy making little knick-knacks. She sculpted all sorts of strange stuff which almost always folded or twisted or opened to reveal some sort of useful tool or piece of equipment. Sometimes they didn't do anything until three or four were slotted together in the correct configuration and then suddenly they merged to form some highly complex device.

She has a theory that she has forgotten many things about psychosurgery and nano-fabrication but that the skills remain somehow as an emergent harmonic pattern floating in the gaps in her Ego. She has kept such ridiculous speculation to herself.

She has fitted right into Titanian culture. Her Rep has rocketed in various fields, she's the go-to gal if you need your Ego tweaked or Mental Trauma eased. She has released dozens of blueprints into the Open Source community under her moniker Rebel. Advanced Protean Swarms that whip up General Hives, Neutrino Transceivers, Multi-channel Qubit Reservoirs, Ego Bridges or Healing Vats that all bear her iconic swooping 'R' logo.

A number of unsigned designs that might be useful for darkcasting operations have built her a solid Rep amongst less salubrious elements and her Psychosurgical skills have drawn attention from the Pax Familiae. While she could make use of the favours this earns her she rarely does. She has no idea of how to deal with people of that persuasion and fears opening a door she can never shut. Any dealings she has with such groups are through forks she has amped with implanted skills and courage.

Her involvement with Firewall is recent. She was contracted to repair a number of badly fractured Egos that had suffered sanity shattering mental traumas. Her limited success in recovering crucial data led to her recruitment as an Agent. She mostly performs after action psychosurgery on more hands on Agents. Infomorphs are Ego-cast to her, treated in accelerated simulspace and ego-cast back to their home habitats ready to return to operational status.

The profits from her activities have allowed her to pursue her own long term goals. Her repaired Morph has been substantially augmented and she uses it to explore the alterations to her own Ego. She can easily be running six or more Forks simultaneously which are constantly being re-merged back into each other. The old battered clank that the Plurality lent her has been purchased outright. It's limited intellect makes alterations to her own Ego substantially easier to perform and she occasionally uses it with exceptionally resistant patients. She also has a couple of flats in hibernation for emergency use.

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Meanwhile in the depths of space, one hundred million clicks from the ecliptic, dozens of anonymous chunks of proto-comet are slowly transforming under the direction of millions of pre-programmed nanites.