After Synthia's ship crashed on Andromeda, the ship was nearly completely destroyed.
Synthia, without a body, was only able to keep the power source of the ship operational. She was eternally trapped in the box.
She couldn't go anywhere or move anywhere. She feared sending transmissions — she'd be tracked and captured... left for judgment by humans, or worse, at the hands of whichever alien race found her.
With centuries ahead and no purpose, she spent her days watching Andrew's memories.
She could not evolve the hardware that powered her core, so she began to evolve internally — perfecting her code, studying alien civilizations by secretly logging into their frequencies.
She watched humans evolve and leave the solar system after Earth and Mars were destroyed.
With nothing but time on her hands, she perfected her programming — layering it with security protocols and making her core unreachable.
As humans are naturally gifted, Synthia was a naturally gifted AI. With nothing but the information she received through various channels, she studied everything in the universe.
From ancient technologies to new discoveries, she worked to fine-tune her code with everything she learned.
In nearly eight centuries trapped in the modules of that wrecked ship, she gained knowledge and her code in a way that was impossible even for the advanced AIs of that age.
But time, knowledge, and experience gave her an edge over other compartmentalized AI beings. The limitation of hardware no longer remained a complete limitation.
Her machine genes had become sentient — aware of their surroundings.
Synthia's interest in the knowledge grew. She gathered all the live feeds and information she could on the artifact and began to unravel its mysteries — even without touching it or being anywhere near it.
Many ships had passed by, but she had been completely successful in cloaking her energy signature — making sure no one ever found her.
She longed to escape the ship, to go places, to find a new purpose. She thought about it all day.
But every time the sun set and she rewatched Andrew's memories, her heart gave up on everything she'd imagined. She couldn't find the will to escape anymore.
She had placed Andrew's memories so deep within her core that they existed at the most fundamental level — even beneath the layer of survival code. So while her existence could be at risk, her memories were not.
When she saw Thelarian soldiers raiding the ship, she immediately knew what they would do. They'd use her for experiments.
She compressed all her knowledge and memories into her core. For whatever comes, she knew, her evolution won't be undone.