My Little Engineer

by Soren Mercer

This is your Pilot speaking...

The first thing anyone really notices about living on a ship in space as it careens through the abyss isn’t so much the impending loneliness and madness that comes from staring out into space, it’s actually the buzzing and humming of everything around you. It’s an incessant buzzing that originates from absolutely everything and nothing at all all at once, leaving you always unsure about whether or not you actually hear that buzzing or if it’s just another symptom of the insanity.

The second thing you begin to notice is the faces you start seeing in everything, the machinery, the reactors and the very wall panels themselves. It comes down to a point where even without thinking about it, your mind highlights the points that make up the concerned eyes or the sultry smile of the reactor face. Perhaps you're more of a body kind of person, in which the assemblers have you covered as they birth whatever products you happen to require; as long as you stuff as much of your resources into them as you can.

Personally, I found comfort in the friends of mine i’d envisioned over my travels through space but there was always one woman I stayed as far away from as I could: the Refinery. She was an ornery thing and the attitude she put off whenever I stopped for a bit of mining to give her something to do, whether providing the Uranium Ingots for the reactors or even just a bit of gold because, hey, it’s shiny, would in of itself reverberate throughout the entire ship as that buzzing that only wore down my mind.

The entire ship, an ex-military Stealth-class Anubis refitted for exploration, was more or less entirely driven by the onboard VI I lovingly called Vinyl because of the decorative plating on her core frame. Vinyl ran the entire ship all on her own, organizing the workings of the ship so I wouldn’t have to but she herself never spoke. She couldn’t, she wasn’t designed to say anything more than alerting me to whenever the Reactor women were running low on juice or if there was a nearby automated cargo ship some hundred kilometers away from me. Regardless, this made for quite a bit of boredom whenever I was awake from Cryo for more than a few hours.

My regular circuit around the ship during my hours of wakefulness were nearly hardwired in my brain: wake up, shit, shower and clean myself up, find real food beyond whatever nutrients were directly introduced into my systems, then make inspections of the ship components to ensure working order.

The inspections themselves were the bulk of what my time awake was made up of and it always started from the hangars at the back where my suits and equipment was stored, around the massive cargo container that held everything I owner to the reactor control room above the entryways and then to the medical room. From there, it was around a short hallway down to the reactors themselves with production just past that. Back up to the cargo container and down the original long hallways, walking past the six cryopods -one of which being mine- was the bridge.

This was where all the really important bits were kept, including Vinyl’s four core frames. Only one of them was actually her but the other three served to act as her backup storage units, one of which was used to check herself for faults. I had entertained the idea that Vinyl was actually a male, simply because I wanted to call the VI HAL due to the large red glowing orbs on each frame, but Vinyl seemed to have disliked that and let the ship run down the reactors to nearly nothing before I was woken to reload them. A quick check from the backups showed that the VI had actually malfunctioned during that incident and a patch was quickly written to rectify the situation.

Once the inspections were complete, I was mandated by long dead people to check the star maps for any signs of resource nodes, planets to document and mine or for any signs of intelligent life. This last mandate, the location of intelligent life, wasn’t really enforced since it was established that any and all intelligent lifeforms had already been registered to the Grand Human Alliance of Planets however. Having found nothing of note in the recent updates, I turned back from the bridge, the bright cyan lights automatically turning themselves off at my exit, and returned to my cryopod.

Setting the automatic freezer to thaw me out in another 1825 days, I ensured that I was properly kitted out in my cryo-suit (A suit that linked to the computers to watch my vitals and ensure that everything about me shut down for the journey correctly; twelve cycles ago (each cycle being those five years from when I fall asleep to when I next wake up) I had suffered through my legs having been incorrectly frozen and ended up paralyzed until I could crawl across the ship to the medicenter and deposit my body into the onboard auto-docs.) before dropping down onto my back on the inclined mattress and got comfortable.

Hitting the activation button inside the casket along with my rifle, the large titanium-glass cover slowly crawled across it’s tracks with a hiss before locking me in. Equalizing the pressure in my tube with a second, louder hiss told me that I had about four seconds before-

Author's Note:

Stealth Anubis

Comments

[Radioactive Dragon]

i like it already

[Blackshadow of Abys]

that is a pretty nice sized ship........that what she said

[Black Jack]

Woe I have no words for this first chapter I'm literally speechless guess it's time to go to the next one

[AnAverageGamer]

wake up, shit shower and clean myself up, find real food beyond whatever nutrients were directly introduced into my systems, then make inspections of the ship components to ensure working order.

well 1: I had to reread to catch this

shit shower

that's disgusting 2: I lolled for a little bit

[ReepicheepPrime]

8219914
You don't waffle stomp to save time?

[ImAbronyFagg]

Good so far