Troubleshooting
Leah has a list a mile long, and on a ship this old, sometimes things just don’t work right.
Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.
Previously: Leah sold off her computer fix-it shop on the planet Izra and left her life on solid ground to live among the stars, with no prior experience of how to do it.
In the six days since she first arrived, Leah got herself into a routine. She woke around six and unzipped the sleeping sack she’d tied to the old-school sec-rail that ran the length of the ship. Back when Aspiration was made, all ships came with a securement rail that had regularly punctured holes to tie to every five feet or so. They were used when artificial gravity (artigrav) was toggled, because even when your normal Gs were applied, it could still be sudden after weeks or months in zero. Now, though, most ships were only required to have a securement station every sixty or so feet, so nobody bothered with a rail along the length of the ship anymore. Leah had shaken her head when she first saw it and thought to herself, They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
She took off the coverall she’d worn the previous day and fallen asleep in and put it into the cheap, mobile flash she’d brought with her for decontamination. Eventually, she’d get the shipboard flash connected to do a proper decon, but she hadn’t gotten there yet.
She went to the bathroom (she’d patched the water reclamation system the second day, but in zero it was still an adventure) and floated towards the mess, where she fished out a Nutrio© bar from the crates of supplies she’d brought from Erin’s shuttle. She sat in the air above the actual dining table, munching on the bar and dreaming of coffee. Eventually, she realized she was just sucking on the wrapper so she pushed off from the wall, towards the docking port. Beside the door was the to-do list she’d made her first day, written out directly on the wall in all caps because she didn’t have any paper and she was planning on painting eventually anyway. The large black marker she used to write it and cross things off was duct-taped at a crazed angle just to the right.
The first few days it had been pretty obvious what to work on (basic satellite-to-satellite communication, water reclamation, artificial atmosphere) but by day seven she’d finally gotten to the point where she had to make some choices.
The solar panel array that Erin had set up while Leah brought in the last of her supplies was working to power the handful of systems she’d brought up in the last week. But if Leah brought up another one, she’d have to turn off one of the existing systems or turn on the reactor, which was the first item on her list. Bringing up a reactor without a real computer was basically suicide, though. She didn’t know enough about fusion or anti-matter reactors so she was as likely to blow herself up as get the ship powered. Hell, even though she’d looked at the reactor, she didn’t even know what kind it was.
She moved her eyes down to the next item: stasis chamber.
The stasis chamber was still locked tight, which meant there was probably something in there for food, but her mobile flash probably wasn’t big enough for a whole crate of rations. She didn’t have the shipboard flash up and running yet (that was on the list after stasis chamber), never mind a computer to run decon procedures and print out results (listed after shipboard flash). And besides, she couldn’t afford to get sick with the schedule she was trying to keep. The ship had been up here for more than three hundred years according to legend, so she was sure whatever supplies were left in stasis couldn’t be safe for her gut.
Now that she was thinking about it, a computer was necessary for almost everything that was left on the list: the cooking system in the mess, navigation, long distance comm.
Her eyes skipped down to the last item on the list: artigrav.
Her traitorous brain reminded her she didn’t need a computer for an artificial gravity system. She knew she’d have to turn it on eventually, unhook the sleeping sack, and retire to a real bed, as the health problems from living in zero were a common subject in nearly every school’s fifth grade health class.
But she didn't want to yet. In zero, she didn’t have to be in her chair. In zero, she felt free.
She skipped back up to the item listed “computer” and thought about it again. A computer would be nice for some of the things she’d brought online already, like water reclaim. Right now, she was checking it herself daily to make sure it wasn’t contaminated, but it took a good hour or so each day and she was only human. There was a good chance that after a couple weeks she’d make a mistake.
She sighed and turned towards the main corridor, grabbing the small box of tools she’d hooked to the sec-rail with a carabiner for easy access.
She’d been avoiding working on the computer, even though she knew she should, but to be fair to herself, she wasn’t avoiding it quite as much as she was avoiding artigrav. It just felt a bit like favoritism if she worked on it first, as if the fact she’d owned a fix-it shop for three years meant she’d be more willing to deal with computers than anything else.
But she couldn’t avoid it; sometimes computers just made life easier.
She floated down past stasis and sick bays (she remembered which was which from her explorations on the first day) and past the access tunnel that led down into the cargo bay. The last door on the left led into the reactor, and the one opposite was the computer mainframe. They had to be close together or voltage drop would be too high and the computer wouldn’t even be able to add two and two.
Not that it matters right now, Leah thought to herself as she clipped her toolbox into the nearby hole in the sec-rail and pried a panel off the wall, looking for the power supply. When all the computer has to eat is star juice instead of tasty anti-matter, matter reactions. She pulled another panel away and found it. She let the panels float out into space around her as she had no way to tie them to the sec-rail, and opened her toolbox to remove her screwdriver.
I wonder if cold fusion tastes like gazpacho, she thought, as she identified the screw head and attached the corresponding bit. She’d told Ralph about her theories on the taste of different energies. He’d thought it was strange, but to her it was perfectly reasonable.
“Living things get their energy from food, right?” she’d said, taking a swig of her beer. It had been a beautiful summer night on Izra and they’d been sitting out on her rooftop, looking up as Aspiration bled water into the sky.
Her mouth watered as she unscrewed the top of the panel leading to the power source, remembering. She grabbed the vacuum canteen around her waist with her other hand, squeezing some water into her mouth, and then pushed it back down again. Christ, she missed beer.
“So it’d make sense that to plants and bacteria and computers different sources of energy taste different,” she’d continued on.
“They don’t have tastebuds,” Ralph said, taking the beer from her hand and sipping on it. They were sitting on a couch that might have been blue at some point in the past, and he’d pulled her legs on top of his own. He always did that when they were sitting close together and she’d never asked him why. She wiped away a tear at the corner of her eye, as she carefully attached the conduit from the solar panels to the power supply. She missed him too.
“Well...yeah,” she admitted, leaning forward and attempting to steal her beer back. “But-”
“Nope,” Ralph said. He leaned away from her swatting hand reaching for her beer, and stuck out his tongue, as if to show that he wasn’t a bacteria; he had tastebuds. “That’s it. You can’t taste something if you don’t have tastebuds.”
She hadn’t been able to convince him, but he hadn’t been able to prove her wrong either. After all, the only way to know would be to talk to a generalized AI and those had been illegal for more than a hundred years.
She admitted to him later that the belief didn’t make any sense. But she did still wonder.
“Okay,” she said to herself as she checked the connection for a third time. The wires she’d brought on board were only a little better than string, but it had worked for the rest of the systems, so she expected it to work for this one too.
She pulled herself back towards the nearest comms hub and ran a command to stifle the power supply to comms and route it to the mainframe instead. This was another thing a computer would be good for; she could start this type of power exchange through a voice command instead of having to use a manual keyboard. She waited a minute to let the comms shut down and initiated her dead man’s switch protocol, so that somebody would come knocking if she didn’t turn it back on in two hours.
She should have felt itchy having comms off, a slight twinge in the back of her head that something was wrong.
But she didn’t. Just like not having artigrav, it made her feel free.
The only one she could depend on in this moment was her. If she screwed up, she only had herself to blame.
“Hold onto your socks,” she whispered and flicked the switch to the on position.
Nothing happened.
She glanced towards the little green light that indicated whether the computer was booting up. It was still dead.
She flicked the power switch off and on again.
Still nothing.
She furrowed her brow, flicked the switch to the off position again, and disconnected the conduit from the mainframe power supply, holding the live wire aloft with her right hand. She really should have turned off all solar power while it was disconnected from a load because holding a live wire was a dumb way to ask for death, but the switch was all the way on the other side of the ship and it was only a couple seconds anyway. She pulled out her portable console with her left hand and carefully connected it directly to the live wire. In the upper right hand corner, she saw the lightning bolt sitting in the center of an empty battery, the universally understood symbol that said the console was connected to power.
She disconnected it from her portable console, reconnected the mainframe power supply, and started going over her work again, grumbling to herself. She ran through all the wires connecting solar to the computer mainframe, and traced her way back to the monitor she’d set up to tell her the output of the array and load requirements from other systems. Aspiration was in the dark right now, but it was only an hour away from the rise of the second star, Hebos, and there should have been plenty of energy in the power cells to last until then. She clicked through the monitor and found she was right; Aspiration could have sat in the dark for another two days before she’d run out of power.
She cocked her head once more and looked back down the corridor, where the door to the mainframe was sitting wide open. She squinted her eyes at the door as if the computer was a troublesome cat who’d made a suspicious noise.
There was nothing wrong with the computer itself, she’d checked it over on the second day when she’d taken inventory and fixed the water reclaim. And as far as she could tell, energy was flowing exactly where it should be. Maybe the little green lightbulb on the outside of the mainframe had burned out?
She pushed off the wall, floating towards the mainframe again when she heard it: a creaking groan as the ship slowly began to turn around her.
“Oh shit.”
Gravity crashed down all at once, and she slammed into the corridor floor, sliding from the momentum of zero G. She landed in a heap against the wall, head cracking against steel.
She tasted copper and her vision was blurred. Probably a concussion. A distant part of her mind told her that she shouldn’t pass out, but a closer part said she was probably going to.
Two thoughts warred in her mind as she began to lose consciousness. The first was that it shouldn’t have been possible; she was sure that she’d sent solar power to the mainframe and not artigrav. The second was an instinct from years of computer programming: a strange exhilaration of knowing something happened after an hour of nothing, even though it wasn’t what she expected.
But, just before darkness overwhelmed her, both of those thoughts were driven out as she heard static come over the ship-wide comm boxes and then a handful of words, flat, empty, and smooth: “What foul knave is this?”
Commentary on this episode for paying subscribers can be seen here.
Credits:
ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.
Emily Westland as producer and editor.
Jamie Philips as design consultant.
Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.
Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.