Despite the damage to the rest of the ship, the fabrication center was in relatively good shape. It wasn’t undamaged, but there weren’t any rents open to space or entire sections of wall or ceiling collapsed.

  Jacob spent time going over every device, which took quite some time since he had to sort through the data that Melody had given him. When he was done, he had a firmer understanding of what the machines did and how to fix them.

  It would have been simple if the damn fabrication center were online, but it wasn’t.

  That meant Jacob had to get creative.

  The first thing he did was disconnect from his current drone and switch to the one near the collapsed corridor.

  After what seemed like days of effort, he managed to clear some of the blockage away. Not enough to clear the passage, but enough to create another monstrosity.

  Jacob was glad there was no air inside the ship, because he was certain the long piece of welded-together metal he was dragging across the floor would have made an awful racket. It was a bridge, and he really should have thought about making one before risking jumping that gap to reach the fabricator.

  It took a bit of effort to maneuver the structure into place over the missing floor, but he eventually managed it, and then he welded his end to the floor so it couldn’t shift. After that came the time to test the temporary structure.

  The drone trundled over the bridge, but he had to go slow as it kept wanting to float away, forcing him to grab hold of the structure to ground himself repeatedly. He was going to need to add some sort of rail to make it easier to traverse. He also realized that he couldn’t let the drones take the route without him being in control, or they might float off into space or end up tipped over.

  It was an annoying problem, but he was making slow progress.

  Once the bridge was secured on both ends, he sent the drone to the recharge station and connected with his original drone.

  It was odd watching the drone pass him in the hallway, and Jacob couldn’t help waving at it. It didn’t wave back, obviously, but it did make him feel less alone now that something else was working inside the ship other than him.

  Jacob took breaks occasionally and used those to mark the passage of time since he didn’t have any other way to measure it. He just referred to them as work cycles, or cycles. Ten of those passed before he was satisfied that he had scavenged every battery, every drone component, and every loose piece of wire he could in the section of the ship he had access to without having to spend days clearing away damage. Unfortunately, most routes were blocked by debris, which he wasn’t willing to tackle just yet. The few routes that weren’t blocked led to hangars, the fabrication center, and more sealed doors.

  He debated opening the doors, but decided against it for the moment. Once the fabrication center was operational, he would open up that can of worms.

  Another ten cycles passed as he dismantled the broken parts and used some of the components and wires to bypass damaged systems within the fabrication machines. Slowly but surely, the lights winked to life on the long-dormant devices.

  Jacob could feel a vibration within the floor as the room came to life. He imagined that if the ship had an atmosphere, the room would be humming with sound as well.

  Once the last machine was operational, he moved over to the main control panel. Whoever the eiraxins were, they could take a few classes in UI design, because their systems were truly awful to wade through.

  He did eventually locate the first of many items he wanted to manufacture. It was a simple replacement bogey wheel for his drone. The one he had damaged pretending to be Evel Knievel. After that, he found an arm to replace the one he smashed during that same foolish attempt.

  From now on, he would leave those sorts of tricks to the professionals.

  Replacing the parts came easily once the machines finally spat them out.

  Jacob was a bit disappointed in the fabricator’s production speed. He had imagined some alien marvel machine capable of creating anything he wanted at a moment’s notice. The reality was far more disappointing. It had taken almost a full cycle to produce one wheel, and two full cycles to produce a functional replacement arm.

  He would have been less annoyed by how long it took if the information on the control panel included runtime. The eiraxins apparently never saw the need for such information.

  Honestly, the more Jacob learned about the ship, the more he thought that there was something fundamentally wrong with the people who had built it. There were obviously things they excelled at building, like the AI and FTL systems, but when it came to things like wiring and robotics, it was like they had a complete blind spot on how to design and build those systems as efficiently as possible.

  Even the layout of the ship felt like an afterthought. It was almost as if they decided what they wanted to have in the vessel, then designed everything else around it without regard for efficiency or ease of maintenance.

  Jacob knew humanity lacked even the capability to build such a large vessel, but he thought if they did have the knowledge, it would have been far better than this hunk of junk.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  He sighed. He was probably being overly critical because he was annoyed and upset now that he had been stuck alone on the deteriorating ship for over twenty cycles. He focused back on the stupid control panel and tapped the down arrow on the side to the next item in the library. Frustration threatened to bubble up once again as the next item to appear wasn’t the item he was searching for.

  There had to be a better way to go through the fabricator’s massive archive of components, but if there was, he didn’t have that information. He had searched the data Melody had provided him thoroughly in the hopes of avoiding the grueling process he was going through at the moment. Without Melody around to guide him, he was stuck doing it page by slow, agonizing page.

  ***

  Jacob sat in his virtual space, glaring at the image of the drone like it had personally offended him. It had been forty-seven cycles, but he only had one more component to locate to replace his cobbled-together fixes in the fabrication center. Only one piece left, and yet he sat there, glaring away in silent hate. He was having a hard time pushing himself to continue using the infuriating interface, even though he knew there was no other option.

  On more than one occasion, he had been tempted to drop the project and work on clearing up some of the blocked hallways, but he stuck with it out of sheer stubbornness. He was the type of person who liked to complete a project before moving on to another. Mostly because if he started a new project, he rarely ever wanted to go back to the one he had abandoned.

  He didn’t have the luxury of abandoning this project.

  With a grunt of effort, which was completely unnecessary given his digital existence, he stood from the floor and dragged his feet over to the drone. Before he touched it to activate the connection, a voice startled him.

  “Captain, I see you’ve made quite some progress.”

  “Gah!” he shouted and spun around, finding Melody’s light bobbing nearby. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

  “Apologies, Captain. I would have warned you I was going into standby mode, but the additional power draw caused by your integration drained my reserves faster than I calculated. I had to shut down quickly to conserve energy.”

  Jacob could sit there and complain, but he realized he might have limited time with the AI. “Is this going to keep occurring?”

  “At least until the main power is restored,” Melody confirmed.

  Limited time, too many questions, he needed to focus on what mattered. “Is there a better way to access the fabricator’s catalog of parts? The main control panel isn’t exactly intuitive,” he grumbled.

  Jacob was certain the ball of light tilted sideways in confusion for a moment before bobbing slightly in place. “I reviewed the logs, and I understand the issue. As Captain, you can simply call up the interface from here and adjust it to your liking. It is much like with the drones or anything you create inside your virtual space.”

  “I tried that,” Jacob said in annoyance. “Dozens of times.”

  Another confused tilt, then the light bobbed once. “I believe I see the problem. You need to know the connection address of the item you wish to pull into your virtual environment. That is usually something the engineering crews are provided in their training, not the captain. Would you like me to provide that knowledge for you?”

  “Do I have a choice?” he ground out between clenched teeth. The effect was not nearly as satisfying in the virtual world.

  “Well,” Melody went on, “if we had an engineering team, it would be superfluous for you to learn such things. Since I cannot revive any of the other humans to fill that role, I’m afraid this is the only way.”

  “What! You have other humans on board? When were you going to tell me?”

  “Captain, I told you this before you agreed to be my captain.”

  “I thought you were being metaphorical, not that you had them on board and ready to go if I turned down the offer.”

  “With the damage to the ship’s systems, I couldn’t risk not having replacements aboard in case of failure. Your experience is a good example of what can go wrong.”

  “Are they okay?” Jacob asked.

  “They are fine for now, Captain. The science vessels are still partially operational and can maintain their suspended states for years to come, so long as the vessels aren’t used for anything else.”

  “H-How many?”

  “Five, Captain.”

  Jacob wasn’t alone. Not entirely, anyway. That was comforting in a way. He did feel bad for the people since they were stuck for the time being, but he couldn’t do anything for them at the moment.

  Knowing that other people were counting on him also made his job much more important. He knew what he had to do, but he didn’t like it.

  He sighed. “Fine, let’s get this data transfer over with so I can get one system working and move on to the next.”

  The spike of pain shot through his mind, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the language or repair data dump.

  “How long until you go back into standby mode?” Jacob asked as he worked the last of the pain out of his head by rubbing his temples.

  “Unclear,” Melody replied. “My internal clock is not accurate, and calculating the orbits of planets in your solar system to account for such a short duration is impossible with the working sensors.”

  “So not long?”

  Melody’s orb brightened slightly to show it was about to respond, then it winked out.

  Jacob threw his hands up in defeat. Then he dug through the new data Melody had stuffed into his head and found the connection to the fabricator. It wasn’t hard; most of the connection links were greyed out.

  An exact duplicate of the physical console appeared in his virtual space, and he cursed. “Absolutely not!”

  He had grown pretty proficient with modifying and upgrading his space over the last sixty cycles, so with a wave of his hand, the console vanished, leaving only the data connection. He pulled it with both his hands, and the image expanded. Then he smashed it, and it shattered into dozens of smaller images.

  That still wasn’t enough for him. He pulled more until the images wrapped around his entire body from about a foot away. From there, it took quite a bit more finessing to get the result he was looking for. When he was done, a slowly rotating catalog of parts that would update as they passed out of his field of view was left behind.

  He could speed it up, slow it down, or rewind it with a simple swipe. And now that there were twelve images stacked on top of each other, he could search much more quickly than before. It would still take time, since the catalog didn’t seem to have any sorting algorithm, but he could work with it for now. When he had time, he would fix that eiraxin oversight and make more improvements.

  Jacob whipped his hand through the part list, and it practically blurred past him for a moment before slowing. He smiled. They may not be sorted in any logical order he could understand, but he could see they were in the exact same order as they were on the control panel, and for once, he didn’t need to start from the beginning of the list every time he printed a new part.

  After only a few rotations of the new interface, he found the part he had spent so long looking for. He selected it, and nothing happened. Confused by that, he hopped into the drone for a moment. He sighed in relief when he saw the machines coming to life to make the part.

  A quick update to the interface added a flashing indicator to show that the part was sent to the printer. Then, for good measure, Jacob added a color-coded finish indicator. Yellow for in progress, and green for done. Simple and effective.