The Lich slowly thrusted into the docking bay of the Palantir. The professor observed the ship with anticipation through the manifold cameras in the ship. The docking bay has been repressurised and permanent artificial gravity was enabled once again. It would be the first time in over a year there would be a human being on board.
A year and a half ago, he messed up. An experiment gone wrong caused Fairchild to experience a serious seizure while in her ship, away from any kind of controlling equipment that could mitigate the damage. After that, everything went dark - the connection between them was severed, the ship engaging its cruise engines and flying away into the distance. He hadn't known the magnitude of his error. Now it would become clear.
The fighter slowed down and stopped on the magnetic cushion in the bay. Even before Fairchild left the ship, he sensed a Vergil discovery request bubbling through the network inside the ship. He intercepted it and connected with the woman inside the fighter.
"Th--"
He didn't even finish formulating a verbal thought before the full stream of Fairchild's emotions hit him like a tidal wave. He could route it through a filter, to extract anything meaningful from them, to filter information. But something inside told him, that he should not. He should experience the full symphony of what had gone through his partner's mind over the course of their separation. The dominant notes were those of terror and anger, with higher harmonics of denial. Eventually, through the wall of fury and dread, gleams of hope started flowing, then realisation and slow acceptance. Finally, understanding, and forgiveness, underpinned by determination. A drone of utter helplessness underlined the entire stream.
Once the first emotional wave finished, a more structured and reasoned stream of thought replaced it, telling him roughly the story of what had happened.
The epilepsy attack after the experiment had left her unconscious for a few minutes - her thoughts jumped straight from the moment she noticed something was wrong to being somewhere away in space. Corroborating his own observations of that fateful moment with her stream, he deduced that the flurry of neural signals must have disabled Vergil temporarily and during the seizure her foot had kicked the switch that engaged cruise.
After multiple hours in space she found her bearings enough to fly again. He saw in the stream that her thoughts were clouded, as if she had been drinking for weeks straight, but despite that she managed to somehow fly to Omicron Delta, to the Freeport. Miraculously not shot down by any Nomads or pirates, she docked on the station and fell asleep in the cockpit.
She woke up hungry, thirsty, angry and helpless. She remembered very little of what happened the previous days. She tried cursing but words did not want to formulate properly and she soon realised she could not speak, write or type. That was when the overwhelming sense of terror set in - the reality of permanent brain damage after a failed experiment. She knew what she had signed up for when she had joined Wisp, but the reality of it at that moment was frightening.
Nagrebetskiy noticed that her brain still processed read information - she could not speak with her own voice but language information was not lost on her. Her internal monologue also seemed to be constructed reasonably well. That indicated to him that the damaged neural region might still be reconstructed or somehow bypassed with Vergil. He observed the rest of her stream, setting aside his human feelings about the matter and letting the scientist part of his brain to take over, trying to understand what actually transpired.
The further months of her life on the Freeport were not particularly absorbing and at this point to her they all merged into a huge amorphous blob of routine boredom. She found the automated supply machines and she barely heard spoken word anywhere, frightened of anyone attempting to engage a conversation with her. It was the frontier, after all, filled with all manner of odd people with various intentions.
The hours she did not spend fulfilling her bodily needs she tinkered with the constellation protocol and the algorithm that she had sometimes used to transform her thoughts into sentences without having to speak. That algorithm worked on specific neural inputs that were affected by her aphasia and so the entire idea fell apart. Constellations used AI, although in a very limited capacity, to generate missing pieces of information and she wondered if she could not seed this AI with a language model that would help her speak.
The experiment, after weeks of tinkering, finally succeeded and the language model allowed her to compose very basic sentences, barely above the level of a five year old. There was an additional limitation, however, that the seed she used held absolutely no proper nouns. Her stream recalled how she had talked to Silverstone and tried to, somehow, get past the constellation AI the words "Palantir", "Kalhmera" and "Planet Crete". Because of that, she developed a very particular manner of speech that was barely understandable to anyone else. Barely, but still better than nothing.
That also explained her being stranded on the Freeport. The inability to recall proper nouns rendered her navigation systems completely unusable, and though she could fly using muscle memory of basic maneuvers, anything that was outside visual range was basically non-existent.
Even though she had just conveyed months of experience to him, the entire process took less than a second. After that, a verbal thought reached him.