The HMSS Delegate was a long-lost sleeper ship of the Nation of Great Britain, launched in the 2040s. She was rediscovered by the CHS Hawking after eons of being adrift, and had even developed a rudimentary artificial intelligence by that time.
Launch and Destination
The Delegate was launched in 2042, and was launched in the direction of Alpha Centauri. Seeing as warp drive did not yet exist, the top speed of the
Delegate was such that it would take over 100 years to reach its destination. So it was decided by the company responsible for construction that 200 able-bodied individuals would be frozen cryogenically for the trip, and the ship itself would largely be automated, requiring only 2 people. One to maintain the powerful ion engine, and the other to maintain the computer systems.
Lost
The Delegate was lost in 2055, after a garbled signal was discovered to have originated from the ship which was extremely baffling. It suggested some kind of mutiny had occurred, which should not have been possible with only 2 people. Fortunately, detailed analysis of the data returned revealed that the
ships main computer, after years of service, suddenly locked itself from access by the 2 skeleton crew members, and repeated attempts to bypass this failed. The data return then terminates, with no warning. Since then, she had been written off as lost with all hands.
Rediscovery
In the 180000s, during a refueling stop to Earth Spacedock, the CHS Hawking picked up a strange signal originating from the direction of Alpha Centauri. On investigation, she came across a very old and very battered ship, the Delegate. Her deflector was full of micro meteoroid holes, and her hab rings were severely dented, but more or less intact. She had apparently missed Alpha Centauri entirely, and had continued on for some hundreds of light years. A small crew was beamed over, which quickly found that her refrigeration system had failed millennia ago, and the only thing left of the crew were human skeletons. A visit to the main computer to see what had happened met with an unexpected response - the main computer had apparently formed some kind of artificial intelligence, complete with speech synthesis.
When asked what had happened, it merely said "ENEMY" over and over. When pressed further, it clarified: "HUMANS ARE ENEMY". Clearly something had happened with the 2 skeleton crew members to make the computer come to this realization. When asked why it thought humans were the enemy, it responded with "HUMANITY CONTROL". Seeing they were getting nowhere with this, they beamed back to the CHS hawking, and a meeting was convened to see if they could tow it back home and clean it up. But very old computer algorithms were inherently dangerous, because current protocols are completely alien to something so ancient.
It was eventually decided to destroy the old craft, to prevent any catastrophes resulting from the apparently rogue computer system. Nothing was left, aside from a few pieces of the deflector. Enough information was collected however to update the Delegate's status from "Lost", to "Destroyed", and it's legacy continues in the form of large library databases on this old ship.