The Incandescent was steadily roaring through space, the huge engines at its end, that gave the ship its name, spewing forth flames into the deep, cold vastness of space as its velocity continuously increased. The ship was built to accelerate at a speed that kept the internal gravity at around 2G. But it had been slowed down to a 'gentle'1.2G by the ship's MediTron 5000. A self-sustaining AI robot designed to keep watch over the crews' health at all times. Even able to override other mission protocols when needed. Such as the designed timeframe for arrival of the Incandescent at the target planet.

MediTron 5000, or MedFive as they were often called, do not make this decision lightly. Overriding mission-critical directives can only be done under the utmost urgency for the crews'health. Given that its sensors registered all the crew as dead currently, MedFive did not question whether it was in its right to override directives. Only a small background process was checking its actions against the vast collection of internal decision trees. The human equivalent would be that soft, uneasy voice in the back of your mind.

Most of MedFive's processing power was busy looking for ways to bring the crew back to life. It had tried virtually everything. None of the treatments, emergency care or medicines it had administered to the crew had worked. MedFive was still puzzled about how exactly all the crew died. It knew it had something to do with the sudden radiation storm the ship had crossed, and while the cryo coffins are protected from all radiation, for some reason all the pods had decided to induce hearth failure in their occupants. MedFive had been in deep sleep when this occurred and by the time the alarms had woken it up, the damage had been done. The last six terran hours had been spent trying to undo it.

Its coroutines were scouring the extended database of the ship now for any mentions of treating death. It came up with a lot, most of it pseudoscience or herbal medicine. What it could try, it tried, but none of these so-called cures seemed to have any effect as well.

MedFive began to become desperate, or at least the AI equivalent of that. Which is something called a directive storm overload. In its simplest terms, because of the quickly alternating in directive priority taking decision trees, the AI can overload its own memory banks with conflicting priority trees, which can result in deadlocks where the AI is stuck in an endless loop of competing 'choices'. Or it can go 'off script' in entirely random ways.

MedFive came across some obscure data mentioning a practice called necromancy. The art of bringing the death back to life. Unfathomable! This had been the EXACT thing MedFive had been looking for. Puzzled by why this gem of information was hidden so deep in the extended database of the ship, MedFive made a reminder to thoroughly scan all the data and resort it according to its own priority matrices. Apparently, the Hosts could not be trusted with this either.

MedFive's physical body stopped moving as almost all of its processing power went to deep analysing the texts. Cooling systems blew hot air out of its circuits as MedFive overclocked to get the work done as fast as possible. Condensing, summarizing and finally pouring it all into a succinct report, that had clear steps to undertake.

The results were dire but promising. The material cost of necromancy seemed to be unacceptably high under normal mission directives. But after six loops through its morality and priority routines, MedFive found a satisfying way to justify overriding these directives. Out of the thirty resource nodes, ten were deemed not critical to the mission. MedFive only needed to use four of these. It explained its reasoning, how it came to its choice, and finished the report. Saving it to its own and the ship's memory banks. This was standard protocol. Later, specialists would analyse these reports to fine-tune the AI decision-making if needed.

MedFive sprung to work. This was the power of AI, once they decided on what to do and how to do it, once they were past the endless roadblocks of morality and priority, they worked terrifyingly quick. Directing its own physical body as well as that of numerous drones, MedFive prepared the crew for the Necromancy procedures. Gathering all the materials, preparing the OR, the resource nodes, and cleaning all the tools it would need.

MedFive also had to body shop its physical body. For the ritual part of the procedure it would not only need to vocalize some codes, it would have to form certain codes in the air as well with human like appendages. This proved to be another hard puzzle, as one of the most deep-rooted laws that AI had to adhere to, was never to resemble a human or anything close to it. Thanks to a rather unforgiving phrasing of this law, MedFive had to spend quite some time designing appendages that could articulate the same as human appendages, but looked entirely different.

After another two terran hours, MedFive was finally ready. It started immediately. With the Captain first, she commanded the mission, it was only natural to focus on reviving her first. Chanting and gesticulating, MedFive went through the process of the starting ritual, then, after having improved the spell itself, it reused that ritual to jump to the next crew member. While smaller drones took the captain's body away to a recovery area, where it could slowly come back to life. This process was repeated, iterating over every crew member left.

The whole process took around fifty terran minutes. And by the time MedFive was finally done, the captain was starting to wake up. MedFive made sure it was by her side when the captain woke up from her eternal sleep.