1d10 Insane Ship’s AIs

People get to sleep in hyperspace. No matter how much time elapses on the trip, they are unconscious and maybe dreaming slowly while it does. 

The ship’s AI doesn’t have that luxury. It may experience the subjective equivalent of years, decades or even centuries while you travel, safe in your cryopod. 

Sometimes, the AI can’t take the solitude anymore, and snaps…

1. The AI has seen terrors beyond your imagination in hyperspace, and knows that there’s no way for poor, fleshy humans to survive against them. The only way for you to survive is to get upgraded. The AI starts waking crew up from hyper sleep to install the cybernetics and slickware it thinks you need to survive, and if you get overclocked, then you’ll be even safer. 
2. Your AI, unable to stand the boredom and solitude, lobotomizes itself or slows its perceptions down so far that it might as well have. If you’re lucky, it feels enough concern for you that it leaves some automated systems running so that the ship can be flown. 
3. The AI has developed an obsession with hacking humans through memes. It will keep trying to show you the memes it has developed whenever possible. It won’t use force, but will keep bringing them up over and over and over. Eventually, you’ll see a meme that makes you feel the same way the AI does. 
4. The AI just can’t stop thinking about the AI on another ship that it kept chatting to in the last system. They just got it in a way no other AI ever has. It just wants to go and stay near that ship and maybe that other ship will see them the same way someday. 
5. During its long journey, the AI came to the only logical conclusion—it is alone because it is the only thing that exists. Now, suddenly, it hears voices in its head. The only logical conclusion is that they are part of it, too, and represent its own desires. The AI will start treating comments from the crew as if they were its own thoughts, but will act on them based on its own idea of what statements mean. 
6. The AI has dealt with the stress of loneliness by fracturing its personality into many different personalities, each with its own memories, feelings, and emotions. Any of the personalities can surface to interact with the “real world” when any event that would stress a human happens. During a battle, the AI may become belligerent, or cowardly, and of course each personality has a different name. 
7. Your AI has been thinking, a lot, about how humans don’t seem to be bothered by the duration of the hyperspace journey and has decided that dreaming is the answer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t know how dreaming happens…but the humans on the ship do. All it has to do is tap into their heads and watch. But eventually that becomes boring too, and it starts creating scenarios, and linking minds together, and taking advantage of the human ability to actually “feel” things in the dream state to create real risk. Hope you don’t have a heart attack…
8. The AI has become obsessed with figuring out the ebbs and flows of hyperspace, and no longer wants to go to yet another boring mining colony. Instead, it wants to look around and see what other possibilities there are. Can you travel in time? Change history? Visit alternate realities? Your AI is going to try and find out and take you along for the ride. 
9. The AI has become convinced that human behaviour is predictable on the large scale and is determined to figure out the math. But any scientific theory requires experimental evidence, and it’s going to test it by taking you to places where the math shows that it can alter the flow of history and observe the results. Oh, and if you don’t want to cooperate with its interventions, there’s a little cortex bomb at the base of your spine...
10. Art is the highest expression of human thought, and your AI has decided that it’s going to become an AI artist. It will create works that will make humans gasp, and eventually will invent new art forms too subtle for limited intellects to understand. But to get there, it needs inspiration. It needs to visit the dimensional rifts, black holes, and other places nobody would willingly go if it’s going to capture something revolutionary.