Corebound Chapter 7

Now that the fabrication center was up and running and all of Jacob’s cobbled-together repairs were replaced with proper components, he checked the work lists that Melody had created.

He was confused at first when the fabrication center was absent on both lists, until he realized it must be showing as green. It took a few cycles to figure out how to access that report, but he managed to do it thanks to the tip Melody had provided before it went offline again.

He was right. Sitting alone on the green list was the fabrication center.

Jacob pinned that list to his virtual fridge, just so he could stare at it and smile when he was eating his fake food.

He had adopted the hobby as another way of coping with his loneliness and boredom. The food didn’t do anything for him, but he could “taste it,” and that did a whole lot to help his mood.

As he shoveled a spoonful of the recreated-from-memory-brand cereal, he looked at the list of chores that needed completing. There were still a bunch of red ones stacked on top of each other at the top, making them impossible to read clearly, but he ignored those and browsed down the list to the fifth item.

Jacob thought the main power feed would have been higher on the list, considering the AI required it to remain active for more than a minute at a time, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t quite sure what criteria Melody was using to sort the priority, but he decided that was next on his list of repairs to make.

He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, even before he selected the option. A map with a white line appeared, and he groaned. The disconnections were all in the collapsed sections. He would need to clear those out before he could get to the lines.

“I’m going to need more help,” he muttered as he chewed.

***

For the next ten cycles, Jacob had the two drones working to assemble a third from spare parts and replacement components. A fourth joined them five cycles later.

He could have waited longer to get more helpers, but he didn’t know if the emergency power would hold out. Based on Melody’s short visit, it was clear that there wasn’t a large surplus of power there. If the backup power failed, he would go with it, and that wasn’t something he wanted to risk.

It was already risky enough pushing back the start date of the repairs to add two more maintenance drones, but he knew he was going to need them.

The four drones moved to the nearest blockage to the fabrication center, bypassing his makeshift bridge. Three were on autopilot, while Jacob manned the fourth, the trusty beat-up model he first started with.

He wasn’t sure how efficient the drones would be, so he mostly monitored them while they worked, making sure to keep clear of the collapse, just in case. Losing the other three units would be a blow if everything came crashing down, but losing all four would be a death sentence.

Jacob was glad he was supervising, because the drones were dumb. It was clear they had never been programmed to handle material removal on the scale they were being asked to do. They were clumsy and kept knocking broken beams and other junk into each other as they worked. It was a far cry from the nearly seamless work they did putting the other units together and helping with the repairs on the fabrication center machines.

He would have built more units to speed up the work, but he was short on power cores. After digging through the pile of broken parts in the hangar, he had managed to locate a total of nine working power cores. They weren’t in very good condition, but they still functioned, which was more than he could say for most of the stuff on the ship. Since they had to be swapped out constantly, he kept five of the power cores in the charging unit.

Speaking of, Jacob sighed and disconnected from his unit, sending it back to the charging unit, while he took over one of the other machines.

He wondered if it was just him, but it felt distinctly different jumping into a new machine versus his old one. He had noticed this back when he had the two damaged models, but he chalked it up to damage and lack of experience. However, this was now the third maintenance drone he had taken control of, and it definitely felt different than the other two. It felt like wearing someone else’s shoes.

The thought was weird, and he tried not to think about it as he helped cut away dangling wires, twisted metal, and large beams, but the feeling never truly went away.

He lasted a full cycle in that unit before deciding to send it to the fabrication center and recalling his instead. They were functionally the same now that they were repaired. His unit just had a lot more character, and it didn’t feel awkward to be in control of it. That alone allowed him to work much more efficiently.

After fifteen cycles, the three units managed to clear up enough debris to allow passage through the corridor once more.

Some of the spare material had been welded across the gap where his bridge was, making it impossible to fall into open space, but most of it was piled along the hallway, because he had no idea what to do with it. The fabrication center didn’t have any way to break the material down for reuse, which brought up another concern for him. How much material did the machines have left for new parts?

Jacob had not seen any display on the device that would show material levels or anything like that, but he decided to take a break and see if he could figure it out in his virtual space.

Once out of the drone, he stretched and popped his back, sighing in relief, even though he hadn’t actually been sore. It just felt like the right thing to do.

“Alright,” he said to himself, “there’s got to be some sort of material level indicator in here somewhere.”

Jacob poked around in the control program for a few cycles with no luck, so he branched out and connected to the other machines in the fabrication center one by one until he finally found what he was looking for.

Once again, the eiraxins had hidden the information in an obscure spot. Jacob only discovered it by accident when he came across an old build log, stating the material supply was low, along with a connection address.

He followed that connection address until he located the device. There were one hundred and twenty-two individual entries on the supply log, and some were already empty. He didn’t understand why there were so many until he started digging into them. The icons were in eiraxin, and each had a unique symbol to go along with it. Thanks to high school science class and the eiraxin language package, he was able to figure out they were elemental symbols.

Jacob wasn’t the best student in high school, but he was pretty sure humanity had only discovered one hundred and eighteen elements, and the really heavy ones were only stable for short periods.

If he was remembering correctly, that would explain some of the empty storage vessels. He doubted he would need exotic elements anytime soon, or ever, so he moved on to the more important elements. Some of the gases were empty, and he hoped that wasn’t going to become an issue. He had watched enough shows on how things are built to know that many manufacturing processes relied on gases.

Everything else seemed to be above fifty percent, which didn’t really mean much to him, since he had no clue how large these material storage containers were. He would have to manufacture something, then check the levels to get a feel for the remaining supply. That would have to wait, because he didn’t want to waste any material until he actually needed something first.

It took another forty cycles to clear the remaining blocked corridors to the ship’s main power, and still no sign of Melody, which was starting to worry Jacob. He didn’t have much information to base his conjecture on, but the intervals between the AI’s active time seemed to be getting longer.

Many things could be contributing to the extended downtime, including his increased activity, the fabrication center repairs, or even just the power core charging. He just didn’t know. All he could do was push forward with his repair work and hope he had enough material to bring the main power back online.

Clearing the corridors was the easy part. Once again, the eiraxins’ asinine design philosophy bit him in the ass when it came to patching the broken power conduits. Instead of running the cabling through the wall, so the maintenance drones could easily access it as needed, it was in the ceiling, which was a good six meters up.

He was forced to construct a ramped scaffolding just to allow the drones to reach. Then he had to manage all the repairs himself, because the drones didn’t seem to understand the command to patch the power cabling.

If he ever met an eiraxin in person, he was going to slap them for designing such a stupid ship.

The only upside to his predicament was the fact that the ramp could be moved and reused.

After two frustrating cycles, he finally pulled out the damaged section of cabling. He didn’t know how long he would need to make the replacement, but he had verified that the fabrication center had multiple lengths available for manufacture.

The one smart thing the eiraxins had done was add bulkhead connections to each end of the cables, so sections could be replaced as needed. With the way they designed the rest of the ship, Jacob almost expected to have to pull out the entire cable leading from the main power to the AI core. That would have been a time-consuming and nearly impossible task with only four working maintenance drones. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

The ship builders had even helpfully labeled the length of cabling, and he was starting to suspect someone other than the ship designer had been responsible for wiring. If so, he would have to thank them personally.

Jacob sent the job to the fabrication center and waited another two cycles for the cable to exit the machines. It was frustratingly slow to produce, but he didn’t have any other choice. He didn’t want to manufacture them ahead of time in case one section needed to be longer or shorter. Material was at a premium, so he couldn’t be wasteful.

Speaking of material, he checked the storage levels after the cable was completed. Some had dropped as much as a percent, while others looked not to have moved at all.

That was not ideal, given the state of the ship, but he would have enough to finish repairs on the main power conduit.

He retrieved the new cable and got to work. There was nothing else he could do. Well, there was one thing. He assigned the other three drones to building a second ramp. That way, he could move to the next work site without having to wait for his existing ramp to be dragged there.

It worked, too. With the ramp and the added experience of replacing the first cable, he shaved a full cycle off removing the next one. He even got lucky with one section. The cable hadn’t been torn in half. It had simply been pulled out of the bulkhead fitting. He did have to repair the bulkhead connection, but that was a far cheaper fix than replacing the entire length of cable.

After another fifteen cycles, he finally reached the last of the damage. He had to be more careful here because that section connected directly to the main power, which sat behind a closed hatch. He knew this because he had come across the door after clearing the last of the blocked corridors.

Luckily, the maintenance drones had power testers onboard, so he probed the exposed wires to see if they were live. They weren’t. He frowned because he expected to see some sort of power flowing through the wires. Since there wasn’t, that meant something else was going on.

He would tackle that issue next.