“Quinton Silas Arbunot.” Quinton waited a moment, holding his breath and staring down the faceless AI, silently demanding it recognize him. Nothing. He gritted his teeth. “Quinton. Silas. Arbunot.”
There was a beat and then the eye of the bot blipped with a red dot, causing him to sag in relief as the bot mechanic responded. “Quinton Silas Arbunot. Welcome. Would you like me to finish draining the excess axial fluid on the P62J-Wing today?”
His helper was entirely too perky for an AI, but he wasn’t about to complain considering the cost of buying a new one was far and away above his budget. One of these days, he knew, Charleston was going to crap out and not recognize him, at which point he’d have to fork out the money for a system rewrite and that wasn’t in the budget at the moment.
He sighed and loaded up the bot with everything he’d need to crawl around the outside of their latest acquisition.
“Not today, Chaz. Today we finally get to check out that hulk the salvage guy towed in. I probably paid too much for it, but there’s gotta be something good on there.”
“Are you going to turn it into a racer, Quinton?”
“Arbunot. Arb. Arbie. You know I hate it when you call me Quinton,” Quinton said, reviewing the racks of tools and spare parts in the warehouse. “I think we have everything.”
He turned to the bot and reviewed him before setting off for the bay doors. “No, I’m not turning it into a racer. I might repurpose parts of it for the Huzzah, but it’s way too battered to be of much use to me.”
“Where did Jamison say he picked it up?” the bot asked, smoothly following behind him on rugged, too quiet articulated legs.
“Outside of Proteus.” Quinton opened the airlock doors and released the vacuum.
“I am surprised he carted it so far.”
Quinton laughed as they stepped into the airlock. “You are? I’m not. Jamison would cart his junk halfway to Mars if he thought someone was interested in buying it.”
“You bought it.”
“I know,” Quinton sighed heavily. He hooked the loops of his oxygen tubules over his ears and zipped up his liner to make sure none of the sand was likely to find its way into his suit. “And I probably gave him way too much for it.”
“The promise of what might be is not preferable to what is.”
Quinton rolled his eyes. Was there anything as obnoxious as a moralizing bot? The airlock doors opened revealing a barren landscape of light gray rocks and dust. A high wind aerated the dust and sent it up in whorls, clogging vent systems that demanded regular cleaning because of it.
Stretched out before him were multiple landing pads where his uncle’s farm had once been. The rows of crops had been replaced with landing platforms upon which sat a motley assortment of ships and salvaged hulks.
Crews of maintenance men worked the various ships, all of them using one, if not two mech bots to aid them. Most of them were simply renting the berth and paying for equipment and supplies while they made repairs, but there were a few that Quinton was working on for the next couple of weeks, employing a small crew to update drives, perform port clean outs, and recalibrate drive systems with new sets of fluids.
Today was the first time in a week that his crew had had a day and they had decided to make the most of it by visiting Sagan. But a week spent on a cramped, overpopulated space station wasn’t Quinton’s idea of fun, so instead he had opted to stay behind and pull apart the salvage he had purchased.
He jogged over to the pressurized hose system next to the platform where his salvage sat. His first order of business was going to be to clean it off and clean it out. It was hard to tell anything with the amount of rust and sand that had settled on every surface and lodged in every possible crack in the drive ports. He would have to make some kind of shutters to protect them, assuming they were worth saving at all.
He and Chaz spent the next several hours cleaning the small pod and checking out its various parts. The inside had been all but stripped bare of anything usable because Jamison wasn’t about to leave anything potentially valuable lying around.
He leveraged a flat blade into the housing surround at the communication station and pried it off. It slide off and thumped into the ground, barely missing the toe of his boot. He frowned down at the housing. It had flipped over revealing the rear of an unusual interface.
“What on Asterion?” he asked himself, bending over to gently tug at the wiring harness and the collection of wires, crystals, and drive boxes. He pulled the housing up to look at its front. Nothing appeared unusual about it. It was battered, as he would have expected after years of exposure, but nothing indicated that there was anything, an interface or otherwise, on the exposed inside side of the housing surround.
He rubbed his jaw, puzzled. “Hey, Chaz.”
“Yes, boss?”
“Where are you? Come have a look at this.”
“I am working on the upper surface of the scudder. But I will come right away.”
Quinton pulled out an interface tester and began prodding here and there, wondering if the small power bank would be enough to flicker anything to life. It was hard to tell what the interface was for without running power to the pod, but he could do that once Chaz showed up.
Chaz skittered down through the access in the ceiling, coming to a stop at Quinton’s side.
“Take a look at this. It was on the back of the communications surround,” Quinton said.
“That’s interesting. What is it?”
“You tell me. Work your magic. Figure out what this thing is.”
Chaz extended several arms to different parts of the interface, sending power into it. It came on with a slight hum, dim lighting racing in streams around it. “It has memory.”
Quinton frowned. “What? How did Jamison not find this?”
“I believe this was meant to be hidden.”
“Okay. But why? And how did they use it if there’s no interface module on the exterior?”
“I believe it was not necessary. This appears to be experimental technology.”
“What does it do?”
“I do not know.” The bot’s arms withdrew and the lighting died away. “But I did download what information was available.”
“Okay. We’ll review it later. I’m going to pull this off of here and bring it into the workshop. Maybe we can use it on the Huzzah.”
“Maybe it was left behind for a reason. Or whoever lost it may desire its recovery.”
“Finder’s keepers. They are welcome to offer a price, assuming it’s not worth it to me to keep it.” Quinton hefted the housing in his hands and handed it to the bot. “Let’s break for lunch.”
It invariably happened that when the interior airlock door shut, blocking out the blowing gray sands of Asterion, his Aerospace Academy pictures would get knocked askew. For the past ten years he had been promising himself to move the pictures, but it seemed he never found the time. He put his plate into the cleaner, wiping away any traces of his lunch – a lentil topped flatbread – with a napkin and adjusted the pictures again.
It always made him a little sad to see that hopeful face of his youthful ambition staring back at him. When he had taken the photo, he only had a month left before he was supposed to take the Aerospace placement test. His professors had had high expectations of him and he had every hope of landing one of the much coveted pilot positions in Aerospace Command.
But then mom had ended up on her death bed and he missed the test. She died the following year and two days before the funeral, while he was managing obligatory condolences from friends and family, he missed it again.
The year after that he was obliged to help Uncle Hektor bring in the water lentils crop. And at some point, he stopped keeping track of all the myriad reasons why he was never going to take that test.
“Be happy with what you got, young’un.” Uncle Hektor shuffled to the door of his room where a news stream was playing on a section of wall. “I told you, you’re impractical. You should just box that stuff up and put it away.”
Quinton ignored him, sighing and turning back to his pictures as he sipped a cup of Artelian tea. “Yeah, yeah.”
“You know I’m right. The future isn’t in all this junk.” Uncle Hektor waved a dismissive hand at the window and the ships sitting outside on their pads. “People aren’t going to care about any of this nonsense when they’re starving.”
There wasn’t any point in arguing with him so Quinton didn’t try. “I’m going to be working out in the workshop this evening. If you need me, be sure to use the prompter.”
Uncle Hektor mumbled something about hating the prompter but accepted the bowl of food Quinton shoved into his hands. “Take your abomination with you!”
“It’s just an AI bot, Uncle Hektor. Maybe if you had used one to save time on raising your crop, I wouldn’t have been forced to look for a better way to pay the mortgage off and keep us off the street.”
This effectively shut Uncle Hektor up and Quinton headed out to the shop with Chaz in tow.
“Uncle Hektor hates me,” Chaz said.
Quinton snorted. “That he does.”
“I am useful.”
“Yes, you are.” Quinton headed over to the kiosk holding his main processor. A few banks were stored overhead on platforms, but the main interface was at waist level. He pulled open the holographic interface and began opening programs. “Tie yourself in and let’s see what you pulled off that… thing.”
“Yes, sir.” Chaz moved over to stand next to the table and inserted several extensions into the ports under the table.
Quinton navigated into Chaz systems. “We’re going to isolate it before we open the memory files, just in case this is some kind of booby trap.”
“What are you afraid could happen?”
“Oh, you know….” Quinton mumbled as he focused his attention on the work. “You just never know what people are going to do.”
Quinton rubbed his hands together after he finished and glanced at the bot’s ‘head.’ It wasn’t every day that you discovered experimental tech hidden away on a salvaged piece of space junk. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
Of course, he was. It was Quinton who was in need of emotional support. What if this was some sort of Pandora’s box he was about to open? What if he ended being single-handedly to blame for destroying the remains of humanity? Nah. There is no way it would be that Asterion shattering. His fingers trembled as he opened the file.
The holo interface began streaming with data and bits of code. He attempted to discern what it was, randomly freezing portions of code and reviewing it. It was impossible to say what it did.
“Chaz, can you run through the data and analyze it?”
“That will take several hours.”
“That’s okay. I can try to take a deeper look at this interface while I’m waiting,” Quinton said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the housing sitting on a hover cart.
Quinton pulled the cart holding the mystery interface around to the generator and attached energy nodes. “All right, let’s see what we got.”
Did you enjoy this short excerpt? I hope so. If you’d like to see me pursue this story, drop me a line of encouragement! I was liking its direction, but I have quite a few stories set up in this world (Hinterspace), so I’d hate for it to be overkill for my readers….
I like it and would like to see more. A new twist