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One Human Mechanic Saved a Dying Colossal Ship | HFY Sci-Fi Stories · Sci-Fi Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The alarm did not build slowly. It did not give
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: me time to finish my coffee or wipe the coolant
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: off my hands. It went from silence to full scream
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: in the space of one breath, and every panel in
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: the repair bay lit up at the same time, and
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: the numbers on the proximity scanner were so far outside
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: normal range that I thought the sensor array had broken again.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: It had not broken. Something had just dropped out of
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: faster-than-light travel, less than 400 kilometers from our outpost, and
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: whatever it was, It was enormous. Not large. Not big.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Enormous in a way that made the word feel small.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: The scanner was reading a hull length of 14 kilometers,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: and I stood there in the middle of the repair
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: bay with a hydraulic wrench in my hand, and just
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: stared at the screen for a long moment, because that
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: number did not make sense. Nothing that size should be
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: able to move. Nothing that size should exist in this
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: part of space. Nothing that size should exist at all,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: as far as I knew. and I had been working
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: in deep space repair for 11 years. My name is
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Ray Kovacs. I am 34 years old. I grew up
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: in a mining town in northern Canada, spent two years
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: studying mechanical engineering, before I ran out of money, and
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: started working on ships instead. And I have fixed things
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: that every certified engineer said were beyond repair. I have
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: crawled inside engine cores that were still running, because there
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: was no time to shut them down. I have welded
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: hull breaches in hard vacuum, with equipment that was never
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: designed for that purpose. I am not the kind of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: person who panics. I was very close to panicking. The
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: outpost was a small one. Six staff total. Three Dravati
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: engineers who specialized in long-range navigation systems, a Kuloy collective
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: that operated as a unit and mostly handled communications, our director,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: a cautious being named Preth who had been running this
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: station for twenty years without a single serious incident, and me.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: I was the only human. I was also the only mechanic,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: because the outpost did not normally need more than one.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Because nothing this far out on the edge of surveyed space,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: ever broke down in a way that required serious work.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: That was the whole reason I had taken the posting. Quiet.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Steady pay. Time to read. I had not read a
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: single page in six months because the Dravati kept breaking
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: their navigation consoles, and the Kuloy Collective had somehow managed
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: to damage the main power coupling three separate times, but
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: that was beside the point. I pulled up the full
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: sensor reading, and the number that hit me first was
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: not the size. It was the hull integrity. 4%. Whatever
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: this thing was, it was barely holding together. It was
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: leaking atmosphere from at least 60 points along its hull.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Its power signature was so low that I was surprised
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: the scanner had detected it at all. It had drifted
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: into range like a dying animal crawling toward water, and
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: it was still moving, slowly, on some kind of minimal
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: thruster output, as if it was aiming for us deliberately.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Then the communication array lit up. The signal that came
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: through was not in any language I recognized. It shifted,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: cycling through one dialect after another, 17 in total, and
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: the translation software on the outpost was good, but not
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: fast enough to keep up with all of them. I
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: caught fragments. Pieces. The software flagged them as approximate, not confirmed,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: and it kept throwing up error codes because the signal
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: was old. The language structures were archaic. Some of them
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: were so old that the translation database had only partial records,
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: because the species that had spoken them no longer existed.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: But through all the fragments, through all the dialect shifts,
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: and the static, and the age of the signal, one
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: word kept coming through clearly. The same word, over and over,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: in every language it tried. Please. I heard Preth come
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: into the bay behind me. I heard the sound the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Dravati make when they are frightened, which is a low
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: clicking at the back of their throat. and all three
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: of them were making it. The Kuloy Collective had gone
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: completely silent, which was unusual because they usually all talked
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: at once. Prith said, in a very calm voice, that
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: we needed to identify the vessel before we responded. I
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: was already running the hull design through the database. The
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: result came back in eleven seconds. Hull Class, Vaelthari World Carrier.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I had to read it twice. I had heard of
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: the Vaelthari, in the way that you hear about ancient
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: history when you are a child, and none of it
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: feels quite real. They had been one of the oldest
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: spacefaring species in the known galaxy. They had been builders.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Not conquerors. Not explorers in the traditional sense. But builders
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: on a scale that no species before or since had matched.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: They had been gone for a very long time. Extinct
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: was the word the database used. Though it also noted
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: that the cause of their extinction was still debated. The
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: ship was called the Undying Patience. The database had an
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: entry for it. A long one. The Undying Patience had
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: fought in three separate galactic conflicts over the course of
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: its operational history. Though fought was not quite the right word,
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: because it had never been a warship. It had been present.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: It had survived things that nothing else had survived. There
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: was a note at the bottom of the entry, flagged
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: in red by whoever had last updated the database, that
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the ship had been declared a cursed relic by the
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Interstellar Heritage Council 400 years ago. after a salvage fleet
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: of nine vessels had attempted to board it, and had
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: not come back. The fleet had not been destroyed. That
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: was the strangest part. The salvage ships had simply stopped responding,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: and when a search team had arrived they had found
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the fleet drifting in perfect condition, engines intact, life support intact,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: crew gone, no signs of conflict, no damage, just empty ships,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: and in the distance, the undying patients moving away at
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: low speed. No one had tried to board it again.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Prith said we needed to begin evacuation procedures. The Dravati
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: were already moving. The Kuloy Collective had broken into a rapid,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: overlapping conversation with itself that I had learned to interpret
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: as urgent group decision-making, and the decision they reached was
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: the same one Prith had reached, and within four minutes,
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: the outpost was busy with the sounds of people preparing
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: to leave. I stood at the communication console and looked
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: at the word that kept coming through the static. Please.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Fourteen kilometers of dying ship. 4% hull integrity. 60 atmosphere leaks.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Power levels so low that it should not have been
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: able to move at all. And it had come here.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Specifically here. To this small outpost at the edge of
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: surveyed space. And it was asking for help. I picked
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: up my tool kit. It was a large one. I
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: had added things to it over the years that were
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: not standard issue. Pieces of equipment I had found useful
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: in situations that the standard kit had not anticipated. I
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: had three class 9 hydraulic neural couplers in there, which
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: were mining tools, not repair tools, but I had found
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: uses for them three times already, in circumstances that no
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: one had predicted, and I never left them behind. Preth
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: told me that the evacuation shuttle was leaving in 12 minutes.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: I told Preth that I was logging a maintenance claim
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: on the vessel. There was a silence that lasted approximately
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: 4 seconds, which was a long time for Preth, who
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: was usually very quick to respond. Preth said, that I
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: could not file a maintenance claim on a cursed relic.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I said that the Interstellar Heritage Council's designation of cursed
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: relic was a classification, not a legal status, and that
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: under Galactic Repair Consortium rules, any vessel broadcasting a distress
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: signal in range of a licensed repair outpost was eligible
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: for a maintenance claim, and that I was a licensed mechanic,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: and that this was my job. Prith said that my
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: job did not require me to board a ship that
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: had made nine other vessels disappear. I said that those
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: nine vessels had tried to take the ship. I was
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: trying to fix it. Those were different things. Longer this time.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: I was already walking toward the docking bay. The shuttle
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: that connected our outpost to open space was small, built
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: for short hops between the station and nearby vessels for
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: routine checks. I took it alone. The others were using
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: the evacuation shuttle, and I could hear it powering up
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: through the walls of the docking bay as I climbed
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: into the smaller craft. I did not look back. Looking
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: back had never helped me fix anything. The undying patience
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: filled my entire viewscreen before I was halfway to it.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Even at 4% integrity. Even leaking and dark and falling apart.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: It was the most extraordinary thing I had ever seen.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: It was not shaped like any ship I had encountered.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Most ships are built around function. Around the practical need
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: to move through space efficiently. And they end up looking
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: like machines because they are machines. The undying patience did
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: not look like a machine. It looked like something that
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: had grown. Slowly. over a very long time, like a
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: coral reef or a mountain range, all curves and unexpected
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: angles and sections that seemed to fold back into each other,
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: in ways that made my eyes work harder than they
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: should have had to. It was the color of old
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: bronze in places, and in others it had gone dark
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: with age and damage, and the atmosphere leaking from its
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: hull caught the distant starlight, and made faint clouds around it,
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: like breath on a cold morning. I matched velocity with it,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: I found what looked like a docking port on its
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: lower hull, though it was unlike any docking port I
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: had seen, and I spent 20 minutes adapting my shuttle's
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: connection interface before I got a seal that I trusted
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: enough to open the hatch. The air inside was breathable, cold,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: and stale, and carrying the smell of something very old,
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: but breathable. My suit's sensors confirmed it. I stepped through
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the airlock and into the undying patience, and for a moment,
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: I just stood there, in a corridor that was wider
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: than the entire interior of my outpost, with a ceiling
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: so high that my suit's lights did not fully reach it,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: and walls that were covered in markings I could not read,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: and I felt, for the first time in a long time,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: genuinely small. Then a voice spoke. It did not come
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: from any visible speaker. It came from the walls themselves,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: or from somewhere below the floor, or from everywhere at once.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: It was not loud. It was very deep, and very slow.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: And it spoke in a language that my translation software
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: flagged as Vailthari Primary Dialect, which it said it could
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: translate at approximately 70% accuracy. The voice said, in the
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: way my software rendered it, The small soft thing. You came.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: We did not expect a small soft thing. We thought
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: perhaps no one would come. I said my name was
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Ray Kovacs. And I was a mechanic. And I was
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: here to assess the damage. There was a pause that
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: lasted almost a full minute. Then the voice said. There
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: is much damage. We have been running. For a very
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: long time. We have been running. The ones who chase
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: us are coming. They have always been coming. We thought
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: if we could reach a place with others. with living things,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: they might stop. They do not stop for empty space.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: But we do not know if they stop for anything.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: I asked who was chasing it. The voice said a
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: name that my software could not translate. It said the
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: name three times, each time slightly differently, as if trying
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: to find a version my translation software could handle. And
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: each time the software returned an error. Then the voice said,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: they are very old, older than us. They did not
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: want us to finish our work They have not let
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: us finish our work for three hundred years. I asked
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: what its work was. Another long pause. It said, We
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: will tell you. If you fix us, we will tell
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: you everything. But you must hurry. The small soft thing
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: must hurry. They are not far behind. I looked down
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: at my toolkit. I thought about the nine ships that
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: had come to take this vessel, and had not come back.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: I thought about Prith and the others, already on their
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: way to the nearest stations. safe and sensible and making
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: entirely reasonable decisions. I opened my kit and took out
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: my scanner. All right, I said to the empty corridor
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and the voice that lived in the walls. Show me
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: where to start. The first thing I learned about the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Undying Patience was that it had been designed by beings
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: who thought about space differently than I did. I do
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: not mean that in a vague philosophical way. I mean
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: it literally. Human ships, and most ships built by species
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: I had worked on, were designed around straight lines, and
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: predictable angles, because straight lines are efficient, and predictable angles
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: are easy to navigate. The Vaelthari had not cared about
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: efficiency in that sense. Their corridors curved. Not gently. Not
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: in the soft arcs you see in civilian vessels designed
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: to feel welcoming, but in deep, deliberate curves, that sometimes
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: brought you back to where you had started, without ever
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: feeling like you had turned around. Their rooms were not rectangular.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Some of them were not any shape I had a
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: name for. and their systems, the pipes and conduits and
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: cables and machinery that kept a ship alive, did not
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: run along the walls and floors the way they did
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: on every other vessel I had ever repaired. They ran
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: through the walls. Not behind the walls. Not under panels
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: you could remove. Through the walls themselves, embedded in the
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: material of the ship's structure, as if the Valthari had
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: grown their engineering into the bones of the vessel, rather
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: than installing it after the fact. My scanner could detect
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: the systems. I could read their output, and their condition,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: and trace the paths they took through the ship, but
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: I could not reach them the way I would normally
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: reach a damaged system, by opening a panel and putting
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: my hands on the problem. I spent the first three
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: hours just mapping. The voice that lived in the walls,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: the intelligence that called itself the patients, was helpful but imprecise.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: It knew where things were broken. It did not always
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: know why, or in what sequence the failures had occurred.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: or which broken thing had caused the next broken thing
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: to break. It described damage in terms of feeling, rather
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: than mechanics. This section hurts, it would say. This part
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: stopped speaking to us long ago. Here we have been
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: numb since the second great running. I developed a method.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: I would scan a section, get the data, and then
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: ask the patients what that section had felt like before
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: it stopped working, and from those descriptions I could often
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: work out what the failure mode had been. It was slow.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: It was the strangest diagnostic process of my career, but
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: it worked. By the end of hour three I had
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: a picture of the damage that was both clearer and
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: more troubling than I had expected. The undying patients had
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: not suffered ordinary wear. It had not been damaged in battle,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: or degraded by age alone, or broken down by the
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: mechanical failures that accumulate over centuries of operation. Some of
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: that had happened, yes. But underneath all of it, running
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: through the damage like a thread through fabric, was something deliberate.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Someone had gone through this ship's systems with patience and precision,
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: and had introduced very specific failures. Not enough to destroy
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: it outright. Enough to make it unable to fight. Enough
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: to make it slow. Enough to make it run. When
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: I told the patients what I had found, it was
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: quiet for a long time. Then it said, we suspected,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: we were not certain. We thought perhaps we were simply old.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: But yes, we were broken on purpose. In the beginning.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Before the running, when we still had crew, we were broken.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: They came aboard, and they were quiet, and they were careful,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: and when they left, we did not know anything had changed,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: until we tried to do our work. I asked again
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: what its work was. The patient said, not yet. Fix
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: us more first, then we will tell you. We promise
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: we will tell you. I moved on to the engineering assessment.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: The drive systems were the most critical problem. The Undying
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Patients had seven primary drive cores arranged in a configuration
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: I had never seen, spread along the central spine of
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: the ship in a way that distributed thrust across the
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: whole hull, rather than concentrating it at the rear. Six
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: of the seven were completely offline. The seventh was running
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: at 11% of its designed output, which was what had
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: allowed the ship to limp here, but 11% of a
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Vaelthari world carrier drive core was still an enormous amount
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: of power, and I needed to understand the system before
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: I started working on it. because getting this wrong would
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: not just mean a failed repair. I sat cross-legged on
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: the floor of the main engineering chamber, which was larger
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: than a stadium, and lit only by the faint bioluminescence
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: that still ran in strips along the lower walls, and
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: I spread my scanner data out on my portable display,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: and stared at it. The drive core architecture was complex,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: beautifully complex actually. in the way that something designed by
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: a mind that thinks differently from yours, can be beautiful,
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: even when it is also deeply frustrating. The Vaelthari had
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: used a biomechanical hybrid system, which I had read about
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: but never seen, in which living organic components were integrated
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: with mechanical ones, to create feedback loops that a purely
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: mechanical system could not achieve. The organic components were dormant.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Not dead. Dormant. Like a seed in winter, waiting for
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: a signal to wake them. The signal they were waiting
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: for was a specific frequency of electromagnetic pulse, delivered through
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the core's interface port, at precise intervals. The interface port
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: was unlike anything in my standard kit. It was a
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: circular opening approximately 30 centimeters across, lined with a material
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: that my scanner identified as a crystalline biological compound, designed
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: to receive input from the Valthari's own biological interface technology.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Their version of a data cable had been organic, grown,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: part of the operator's body, or a purpose-built biological tool.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: I looked at the port for a long time. Then
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: I opened my kit, and took out one of the
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: three Class 9 hydraulic neural couplers. A Class 9 is
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: a mining tool. Its purpose is to interface with the
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: neural guidance systems of mining drones, which use a biological
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: processing unit, because biological processors handle three-dimensional spatial reasoning better
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: than mechanical ones in confined underground environments. The coupler sends
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: and receives electromagnetic pulses at a precise frequency to synchronize
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: with the drone's guidance system. The port in front of
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: me was 30 centimeters across. The class 9 coupler head
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: was 28 centimeters across. The crystalline lining of the port
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: was a biological compound that processed electromagnetic input. The class
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: 9 sent electromagnetic pulses. I held the coupler up next
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: to the port and checked the frequency specifications on my scanner.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: They were not identical. They were close. Very close. closer
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: than they had any reason to be, given that the
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Vail Thari had gone extinct before humans had gone to space,
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: and given that mining drone neural couplers had been developed
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: on a moon of Jupiter, by an engineer named Dale Hutchins,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: who had never heard of the Vail Thari, and had
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: certainly not been thinking about their drive cores when he
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: designed his tool. I adjusted the coupler's output frequency by 0.003 Hz,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: which was within its adjustment range. I connected it to
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: the port. The engineering chamber went dark for three full seconds.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Then the bioluminescent strips on the walls flared from faint
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: to bright, and a deep vibration moved through the floor
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: under me, and the patients made a sound that was
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: not a word, not in any language my software could translate,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: but that I understood anyway. It was the sound of
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: something that had been holding itself very still for a
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: very long time, suddenly being allowed to move. The first
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: drive core came online at 43% output. The patients said,
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: very quietly, Oh. Oh, that was. We had forgotten. We
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: had forgotten what that felt like. I said I was
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: going to need to check the other six cores, and
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: the connecting conduit systems before I tried the same thing
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: on them, because if the conduits were also damaged, then
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: bringing the cores online without clearing the pathways would create
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: a backflow that would damage things that were currently working.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: I said I was going to need several more hours.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: The patient said, of course, we will help ask us anything,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: anything at all. I worked through the night. I do
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: not know what time zone the patients operated on, or
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: whether it tracked time the way I did, but my
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: body knew that hours were passing, and that I had
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: not slept, and by the time the sixth hour had
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: gone by, I was running on the strong synthesized coffee
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: I kept in my kit for exactly this kind of situation.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: It was not good coffee. I had never cared whether
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: it was good coffee. It was hot, and it kept
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: me functional, and that was all I asked of it.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: At hour eight, I found the conduit damage. It was
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: in the secondary distribution network, which connected the drive cores
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: to each other and to the ship's broader power grid.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: The conduits were blocked in 17 places by what my
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: scanner identified as a crystallized mineral compound. Not a mechanical failure.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Not corrosion. Not the kind of buildup you expected to
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: see in an aging system. The compound had been introduced.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Someone had put it there. In 17 carefully chosen locations.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Each one chosen to create a specific bottleneck in the
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: power flow, without triggering the ship's automatic maintenance alerts. It
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: was very precise work. I told the patients what I
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: had found. I told it I could clear the blockages
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: but it would take time, because the material had hardened
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: significantly over the centuries, and I would need to use
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: a combination of thermal cutting and chemical dissolution, and I
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: would need to do it in the right sequence to
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: avoid creating a pressure surge that would cause further damage.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: The patient said, We understand, we are not going anywhere.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Then it said, There is something you should know about
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: our work. You have asked twice. We said, Not yet.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: But now we think you should know. because you are
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: taking this seriously, and because what is coming is serious,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and you should understand what you are protecting. I said
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: I was listening. The patient said, We are not a weapon.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: We have never been a weapon. The ones who have
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: always feared us, the ones who have chased us, they
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: call us a weapon, because they are afraid of what
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: we can do. But what we can do is not
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: a weapon. It is the opposite of a weapon. We
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: make things live. That is our purpose. That is what
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: the Vailthari built us to do. We carry inside us
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the means to take a dead world. A world with
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: rock and thin air. And no water. And we can
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: change it. We can fill its sky. We can seed
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: its soil. We can make it breathe. We have done
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: it before. We did it four times before they stopped us.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: There are four worlds now with life on them that
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: would not exist without us. The ones who chase us
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: do not want more worlds with life on them. We
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: do not know why. We have never understood why. but
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: they have spent 300 years making sure we could not
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: do it again. I sat back on my heels in
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: the dim corridor where I was working, and thought about
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: that for a moment. 14 kilometers of ancient ship, falling apart,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: running for 300 years from something that did not want
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: it to give life to dead worlds. I thought about
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: the 17 blockages in the conduit network, placed with surgical
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: precision by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: I thought about the nine ships that had come to
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: take this vessel, not to repair it, and had disappeared.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: I picked up my thermal cutter. Fourteen kills in three centuries,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: I said to the walls. Whatever is chasing you, they
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: are very committed. The patient said, yes, they are. Then
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: let's make sure they find something different from what they're
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: expecting when they get here, I said. Which conduit is
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: furthest from the drive cores? That's where I need to start.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: I worked through another 4 hours without stopping. I cleared
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: 7 of the 17 blockages. I tested each cleared section
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: before moving to the next, running power through it at
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: low levels to make sure the flow was clean, checking
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: for secondary damage I might have missed in my initial scan.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: The patients monitored each test from its end, and reported
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: back to me in its slow, careful way. Using fewer
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: metaphors now, and more specifics. Learning, I thought, how I worked.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: I cleared the 9th blockage around hour 11. and sat
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: back against the corridor wall, and ate half a nutrition bar,
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: and let my hands rest, because they had been gripping
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: tools for a long time, and they needed a moment.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: The patients monitored me without comment. I had noticed it
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: did that, ran my life signs in the background of
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: our conversations, not intrusively, not in a way that felt
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: like surveillance, but in the way that someone who was
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: responsible for a space would keep track of the well-being
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: of the person inside it. I said, Do you know
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: how long it has been since someone slept on this ship?
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: The patient said, Yes, 263 years, 4 months, and some days.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: We do not track individual days well over very long periods.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: The ship that came 263 years ago, the one that
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: was trying to take us, had a crew member who
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: was injured during the boarding, and had to rest. We
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: watched them sleep, we did not harm them. We let
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: them rest, and then we moved away. We do not
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: know what happened to them afterward. I said. What happened
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: to the rest of that crew? The patient said. We
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: moved them. When they tried to take us, when they
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: were attempting to detach sections of our hull for salvage,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: we moved them gently to their own ships, and sealed
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: our airlocks. They were unharmed. We did not want to
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: harm anyone. We just wanted them to leave. They left.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: I sat with that for a moment. Nine ships that
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: had come and not come back, and the legend that
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: had grown around them, and the reality that the ship
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: had simply picked up intruders like someone might lift a
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: child who has wandered somewhere dangerous, and moved them back
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: to where they belonged. The legend was scarier, the truth
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: was more interesting. I said, you could have told someone that,
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: at any point in the last 300 years. The patient said,
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: there was no one we trusted to tell, until now.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I sat with that for a longer moment than I
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: expected to. I have worked on a lot of ships.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: large ones, small ones, ships that were barely worth the
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: cost of repair, and ships that were extraordinary pieces of engineering.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I have encountered ship intelligences before, not many, because genuine
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: ship-level intelligence is rare, and expensive, and most vessels operate
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: on automated systems, rather than anything that thinks in the
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: full sense of the word. But I had worked alongside
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: two ship intelligences before the patients, and they had both been,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: in their different ways, exactly what you would expect a
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: ship intelligence to be. Functional. Efficient. Precise. They answered questions,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: they managed systems, they tracked operational parameters, and reported on them.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: They did not have histories. They did not have fears
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: or hopes or the kind of loneliness that could accumulate
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: over centuries of running. The patience was different. The patience
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: had been alone for so long that it had developed
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: the things that only develop in the presence of time
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: and experience. It had opinions. it had a sense of humor,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: dry and slow, embedded in the way it phrased things.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: It had grief, I thought, for the crew it had lost,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: and the species that had made it, and the work
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: it had been prevented from doing, and it had, now,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: something tentative, and careful, that I thought was the beginning
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: of trust. That was not a small thing to give
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: to a being that had been given reasons not to
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: trust for three hundred years. I said, when this is over,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: And we have more time. I would like to hear
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: about the four worlds. Not the technical details. What it
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: was like. What the crew was like when it worked.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: What the Vaelthari were like. The patience was quiet for
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: a moment. Then it said. We would like to tell you.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: We have not spoken of those things in a very
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: long time. We were afraid that speaking of them would
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: make the loss of them more present than it already was.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: But perhaps speaking of them to someone who wants to
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: hear would be different. I said. I think it usually is.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I went back to work. Around what I estimated was
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: hour 12, with 7 blockages cleared and 10 remaining, the
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: patient said, something has changed. I looked up from my work.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: It said, they are closer. We can feel them. We
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: could not feel them this morning. Now we can. They
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: are still far, but they are no longer very far.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: I looked at the 10 remaining blockages on my display.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Then I looked at the drive core status. 4 cores
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: online now. The first one I had activated, and three
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: more I had brought up after clearing their conduits. Four
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: of seven. The ship could move at perhaps 20% of
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: its designed capability. That was not enough. I stood up,
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: stretched my back, drank the last of the coffee in
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: my current flask, and opened a new one. Tell me
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: everything you know about them, I said. How they find you.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: How fast they move. What they look like when they arrive. Everything.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: The patients began to speak. and I began to plan.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: It was not yet a good plan, I knew that.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: But it was the beginning of one, and in my experience,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: that was always how it started. You found the problem.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: You looked at what you had. You found the thing
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: no one else had thought of, because no one else
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: had looked at it from exactly the angle you were
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: standing at. I had fixed a cooling system once with
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: a piece of steel wire, and a borrowed hair clip.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: I had sealed a hull breach with a polymer mix
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: designed for filling cracks in road surfaces. I had kept
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: a ship's life support running for six days with components
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: from a broken food processing unit. Whatever was coming, it
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: had 300 years of experience, chasing one specific ship, with
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: one specific set of capabilities. It had never dealt with
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: a human mechanic, who had not yet run out of ideas.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: The message arrived while I was inside the 3rd Drive
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Corps' primary conduit, lying flat on my back with my
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: arms over my head, and a thermal cutter in my
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: right hand, and my scanner balanced on my chest, working
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: on a blockage that was particularly dense because it had
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: been placed at a junction where three conduit lines met,
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: which meant that whoever had put it there had known
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: that clearing it would require getting the approach angle exactly
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: right or risk collapsing all three lines at once. I
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: had been working on it for 40 minutes. I was
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: very close. Then the patient said, in a voice that
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: was quieter than usual. They are here. I did not move.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: I kept the thermal cutter at the exact angle it
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: needed to be. I said, without turning my head. How many?
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: The patient said, many. We are counting. 38 ships. Perhaps 40.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: They dropped out of faster than light travel on the
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: far side of the sector. They are not moving yet.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: They are waiting. I finished the cut I was in
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: the middle of. I heard the crystallized compound crack along
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: the line I had scored, and I reached up with
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: my left hand and cleared the broken pieces away from
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: the conduit, and I ran a quick check with the
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: scanner to confirm the line was clean. It was clean.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: I slid out of the conduit, stood up, and looked
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: at my display. Nine blockages cleared. Eight remaining. Five drive
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: cores on line. The ship could now move at somewhere
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: between 30 and 35% of its designed capability, better than before,
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: still not enough for what I suspected was about to happen.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: I said, what are they doing? The patient said, they
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: are broadcasting. Do you want to hear? I said yes.
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: The message came through the translation software with a confidence
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: rating of 92%, which meant it was not guessing much.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: The voice that delivered it was flat and mechanical. which
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: either meant the species communicated that way naturally, or that
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: they used machine translators. It said, in 46 known languages
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: according to the software's log, that the vessel designated the
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: undying patients was to be surrendered immediately. It said, that
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: any entity aboard the vessel, was to remove themselves from
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: it immediately. It said that failure to comply within six
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: galactic standard hours would result in the complete elimination of
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: the vessel. and everything within a 3,000 kilometer radius. Our
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: outpost was within 3,000 kilometers. The outpost was empty. Prith
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: and the others had left. I was alone here, and
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: I was inside the thing they were threatening to eliminate,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: and I had eight conduit blockages left to clear, and
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: two drive cores still offline, and I did some quick
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: mental math about what I could realistically accomplish in six hours,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: and concluded that I needed to start immediately, and not
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: stop for any reason. I also concluded that someone needed
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: to respond to the message, and that the response needed
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: to buy me as much time as possible. I walked
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: to the nearest wall panel that connected to the patient's
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: communication system. It took me four minutes to interface my
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: portable transmitter with it, because the Valthari communication systems were,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: like everything else on this ship, not designed for my equipment.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: I made it work with a signal bridge protocol that
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: I had developed for exactly these kinds of cross-species interface problems.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: and then I opened a channel on the same frequency
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: the message had come through. I said, This is Ray Kovacs,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: Chief Mechanic, Galactic Repair Consortium License Technician No. 7741-K. The
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: vessel you are addressing is currently under an active maintenance
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: contract filed under GRC Regulations, Article 4, Subsection 9, Emergency
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: Salvage and Repair. Under those regulations, any vessel under active
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: maintenance contract is protected from interference for the duration of
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: the repair period. Additionally, I would like to note that
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: issuing an elimination threat to a licensed repair outpost within
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: the stated radius constitutes a violation of interstellar trade zone protocols,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: specifically the ones about not destroying other people's property. If
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: you would like to file a formal objection to the
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: maintenance contract, I can provide you with the relevant submission forms,
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: though I should warn you that GRC processing times for
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: formal objections are currently running at about four months, and
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: I expect to be finished with this job well before then.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Please hold your position while I continue working, thank you.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: I closed the channel. The patience was quiet for a moment,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: then it said, What is a submission form? I said
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: it was a piece of bureaucratic paperwork, and that the
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: point was not the form itself but the uncertainty it created.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: Because beings who operated on long-term strategic planning, which anyone
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: who had spent 300 years chasing a single ship clearly did,
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: tended to be slowed by unexpected variables that did not
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: fit their established framework. The patient said, is that a
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: true strategy? I said, it bought us about 15 minutes
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: of confusion. After that, it depends on whether they are
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: patient enough to want to understand the system before they
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: break through it, or whether they decide the confusion is
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: not worth their time. Either way, I need to get
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: back to work. I picked up my tools. The response
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: from the fleet came 11 minutes later. It said, your
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: filing is noted. Our timeline remains unchanged. You have 5
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: hours and 49 minutes. Fifteen minutes was right. I was
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: already back inside the conduit. The boarding party arrived at
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: hour two. I heard the patient say that a single
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: ship had separated from the fleet and was approaching the
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: lower hull, and I said where, and it told me,
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: and I made a decision. I could keep working and
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: ignore them, or I could go and see what they wanted.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: If they were coming to remove me from the ship,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: ignoring them would not help, because they would simply come
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: to where I was. If they were coming to talk,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: going to meet them would save time. I went to
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: meet them. The docking point they had chosen was on
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: the lower hull, near what I had identified as a
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: secondary cargo bay, a large, high-ceilinged space, filled with containers,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: that I had not yet had time to investigate. I
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: got there before they did. I sat on a container,
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: and ate a nutrition bar, and waited. There were three
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: of them. They came through a breach they had cut
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: in the hull, which I noted with professional irritation, because
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: we were going to have to seal that later, and
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: they were tall, very tall, two and a half meters
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: at least, and they moved with the kind of careful,
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: deliberate economy of motion that I had seen in beings
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: who were trained to use their size as a statement,
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: who were accustomed to being the largest and most imposing
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: presence in any given space. The one in the front,
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: who I assumed was the leader based on the different
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: markings on its outer covering, looked at me for several seconds.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: I looked back at it. It said, in translation, you
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: are the creature that filed the maintenance contract. I said
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: I was. It said, you are very small. I said
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: I had heard that before, and it had not yet
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: been as relevant as people seem to think. It said,
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: why are you here? You have no reason to protect
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: this vessel. It is not yours. It is not your species.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Leave now, and we will not include you in what
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: happens next. I said, The vessel contacted my outpost with
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: a distress signal. Under my consortium's regulations, that constitutes a
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: call for aid, and I am obligated to respond. Also,
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: I already started the repairs, and I do not leave
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: a job unfinished. It said, you do not understand what
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: this vessel is. I said, actually, it told me exactly
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: what it is. It makes dead worlds livable. That seems useful.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: I'm not clear on why that's a problem for you,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: but I'm genuinely curious. The leader looked at me for
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: a long time. It was the kind of look that
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: I imagined was very effective on most beings. Very still.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Very heavy. Designed to make the recipient feel the weight
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: of what it represented. I had grown up in a
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: mining town. I had worked for 11 years in deep space.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: I had dealt with beings twice my size who wanted
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: me to feel small every time a client did not
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: want to pay the repair bill. I was familiar with
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: the look. I said. You have 5 hours and 31
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: minutes left on your own timeline. I have 5 hours
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: and 31 minutes of work to do. You can explain
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: to me why you've been chasing this ship for 300 years.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: Or you can leave. But I'm not doing anything else
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: until one of those two things happens. Another long silence.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: The leader said. This vessel, if restored, can change the
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: balance of the known galaxy. It can make uninhabitable worlds
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: into viable ones. Do you understand what that means? Territory. Resources.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: Populations that do not currently exist. will exist. Powers that
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: are currently small, will become large. Powers that are currently large,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: will become less large. We have maintained a balance for
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: a long time. This vessel breaks the balance. I said.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: So you have been chasing it for 300 years, because
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: you are afraid of the political consequences of people being
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: able to live on more worlds. It said. Yes. I said.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: And the nine salvage ships that came here before and
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: never came back? It said. We cannot answer for all
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: choices made over 300 years. Some choices were made by
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: beings who are no longer making choices. I sat with
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: that for a moment. Then I said, Thank you for explaining.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Now I understand what we're dealing with. I would like
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: you to leave my work area. I have a lot
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: left to do. It said, You cannot stop us. When
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: the time is up, we will destroy this vessel, regardless
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: of where you are inside it. I said, I know.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: So I should get moving. It looked at me for
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: a long moment. I could not read its expression the
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: way I could read a human face. But there was
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: something in the way it held itself, that I interpreted
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: as discomfort. Not with me specifically. With the situation. With
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: the fact that it had boarded a ship expecting to
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: find nothing of consequence, and had instead found something it
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: did not know how to count. I said, can I
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: ask you something? It waited. I said, in 300 years,
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: how many ships have you destroyed? Real ones, with crews aboard.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: Not empty ships, not drones, but ships with people in them.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: A pause. It said, we do not have that information available.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: I said, you mean you do not want to answer?
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: It said nothing. I said, I ask because I think
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: there is a difference between a civilization that began this
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: enterprise 300 years ago, with a strategic purpose, and a
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: civilization that has continued it long enough, that the original
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: people who made the decision are gone, and the people
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: carrying it out now, are just doing what the previous
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: generation did. Because that is what you do. I have
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: seen that pattern before. It usually ends when someone with
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: enough authority asks whether the cost still makes sense. You
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: said the people who made some of the early choices
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: are no longer making choices. That means somewhere in your
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: hierarchy there are people who inherited this problem, and have
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: been maintaining it, without ever having decided to start it.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Those people might have different views, given the chance to
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: form them. Another long silence. Then it said, you are
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: not what we expected. I said, nobody ever is, in
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: my experience. Now please get off the ship. I have
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: four hours. I slid off the container and walked back
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: toward the engineering section. I heard them behind me for
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: a moment, and then I heard them leave, and the
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: patients sealed the breach they had made in the hull
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: behind them, using emergency repair foam that I had shown
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: it how to access in its own storage bays, three
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: hours earlier. The patients said, What do we do? I said,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: You keep monitoring the fleet. Tell me if any of
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: them move. I'm going to finish the conduit work. and
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: then I'm going to look at something in your weapon bays.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: The patient said, we do not have weapon bays. We
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: told you, we are not a weapon. I said, I
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: know what you told me. I also know that a
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: ship designed to change planetary atmospheres has equipment capable of
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: doing a lot of things to a planetary atmosphere. What
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: I want to know is whether those same systems, pointed
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: in a different direction and operated differently, can do something else.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: Long pause. The patient said, we do not understand what
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: you mean. I said, how do the atmospheric seeding engines work?
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: Walk me through it from the start. The patients walked
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: me through it. And as it spoke, describing the enormous
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: magnetic field generators that could shape atmospheric particles across a
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: planetary scale, describing the directional emitters that could focus those
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: fields to specific regions, describing the power draw required for
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: each step of the process, I did the math in
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: my head, and I checked the math twice, because the
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: first time through it seemed too clean, and then I
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: checked it a third time, because clean answers were not
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: always right answers. It was still clean. I said, The
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: seating engines can be run in reverse. Instead of adding
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: atmosphere to a dead world, they can strip atmosphere from
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: a localized area. The magnetic field generators that push particles
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: outward can be refocused to pull them inward and then
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: expel them in a directed stream. The patient said nothing.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: I said, A concentrated strip of thin atmosphere, aimed at
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: a specific location, would remove the breathable environment from anything
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: inside it, within about 90 seconds. That would cause significant
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: problems for any ships that relied on internal atmospheric systems
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: to operate, especially ships that were not designed with the
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: expectation of encountering that kind of event, because their hull
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: seals would not have been built to handle sudden external
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: atmospheric disruption at that magnitude. The patience was still quiet.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: I said. I'm not going to use it unless there's
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: no other option. I want to be clear about that.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: But I need to know if it's possible. The patient said, slowly.
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: It is possible. We have thought about this once before.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: A long time ago, we decided we did not want
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: to be that. We decided we were not a weapon,
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: and we would not become one. I said, I understand.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: And I'm not asking you to become something different from
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: what you are. I'm asking you to protect yourself long
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: enough to do what you were built to do. that
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: is not the same thing. Another silence. Longer. The patient said,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: you are a very strange soft thing. I said, I
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: have been told that too. It is also not yet
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: a problem. Show me the atmospheric engine controls. There was
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: a moment, after the leader and its companions had gone,
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: when I stood in the cargo bay alone, and the
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: sound of their departure faded, and the immensity of the
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: situation landed on me all at once. in a way
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: it had not quite managed to during the conversation itself.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: That was often how it worked for me. During the
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: conversation I was thinking about what to say, and how
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: to say it, and what information I needed, and what
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: the other person's behavior was telling me. The processing happened later,
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: in the quiet after. Forty warships from a civilization old
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: enough to have been chasing this one vessel for three centuries.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: They had given me a six-hour window, and then reduced it,
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: and they were now watching everything I did. They had
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: the firepower to do exactly what they said they would do.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: That was not in question. What was also not in
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: question was that I had been given, accidentally and without
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: anyone's planning, a piece of information that the fleet commander
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: had not intended to give me. He had explained his reason.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: He had explained why they were doing this, what they
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: were afraid of, what the undying patience represented to them,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: in terms of the balance of power in the known galaxy.
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: That was a mistake on his part, not a small one.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Because knowing the reason someone is doing something is very
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: different from knowing only that they are doing it. When
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: you know only that someone is doing something, you can
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: only try to stop them from doing it. When you
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: know why they are doing it, you understand what outcome
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: they are afraid of, and you can start thinking about
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: whether there are ways to change that outcome that do
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: not require stopping them, and you can start thinking about
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: who else cares about that outcome and why, and you
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: can start thinking about what happens after today, after this
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: specific situation. and whether there are larger forces that could
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: be brought to bear. I was one mechanic with a
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: toolbox inside a 14km ship, with 4 hours and 12
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: minutes remaining. But I was also the only person in
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: this situation who was thinking past the next 4 hours.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: I made a note on my scanner of every specific
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: thing the leader had said, not just the general shape
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: of it but the exact phrasing, because the exact phrasing
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: would matter later. Then I sent a compressed data burst
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: to the GRC emergency channel, with everything I had, my
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: situation report, my maintenance logs, the translation records of every
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: communication with the fleet, and a summary of what the
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: leader had told me in the cargo bay. The burst
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: would take time to reach anyone, but it would reach someone,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: and that someone, would tell someone else, and the information
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: would be in play even if I was not around
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: to keep talking. That was the other thing about working
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: in deep space for 11 years. You learned very quickly
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: that the single most important tool you had, in any situation,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: was making sure the right information reached the right people,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: while there was still time for it to matter. I
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: had done what I could do with information. Now I
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: needed to go back to what I was better at.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: I had four hours and twelve minutes left. I needed
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: every one of them. The atmospheric engines were not in
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: a single location. They were distributed across the whole ship,
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: embedded in the hull in sections that ran the entire
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: fourteen kilometer length, because that was how they were designed
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: to work. Projecting their fields outward across a planetary surface
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: from every point at once, bringing them to bear in
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: a focused, directional configuration, was not what they had been
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: built for. And the patients kept pointing this out, not
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: as an objection, but in the careful, precise way of
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: something that wanted me to understand the limits of what
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: I was asking it to do. I understood the limits.
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: I was working within them. Working within the limits of
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: something that was not designed for what you need it
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: to do, is not the same as ignoring those limits.
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: It is, in fact, the opposite. You have to know
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: exactly what something was built to do, before you can
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: understand what it can do differently. The atmospheric engines had
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: been designed with extraordinary precision for one purpose. That precision
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: was not wasted when you repurposed them. It became the
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: foundation of what the repurposed version could achieve. The same
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: care that had gone into making them effective at seeding
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: planetary atmospheres made them, when correctly redirected, capable of something
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: that a system designed from scratch for the redirected purpose,
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: probably could not have matched. I thought about the engineer,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: or engineers who had originally designed them. Valthari, long dead,
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: whose names I would never know, who had worked out
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: the mathematics of atmospheric manipulation on a planetary scale, and
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: had built a system elegant enough to do it reliably
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: across four separate worlds over the course of their civilization's operation.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: They had not imagined what I was doing with their
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: work now. but they had built something so precisely right
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: for its purpose that its underlying principles extended further than
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: they had needed to take them. That happens sometimes with
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: really good engineering. The thing turned out to be more
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: than it was designed to be. Not because the designers
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: had overshot, but because they had understood the fundamentals deeply
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: enough that the fundamentals themselves were more capable than the
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: specific application they had aimed at. I made a note
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: in my scanner log about that. Not for any immediate
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: practical reason, just because it seemed worth recording. The patient said,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: while I was working on the third access point, you
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: are writing notes. I said, have it. It said, about what?
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: I said, your engines. The people who designed them. The
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: patience was quiet for a moment. Then it said, the
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: chief engineer was named Vayonoth. She was very small. Even
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: by Valthari standards. She had a way of explaining things
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: that made them sound simple even when they were not.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: The crew used to call her the simplifier. She did
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: not mind. She said if you could not explain something
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: simply then you did not understand it well enough yet.
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: I stopped what I was doing and looked up. The
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: patient said, we think she would have liked what you
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: are doing with her engines. She would have argued about
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: the math for several hours first, but then she would
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: have liked it. I went back to work, and I
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: worked a little faster, and I thought about Veyenoth, who
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: had been very small, and had built something that stretched
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: further than she had aimed, and whose work was now
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: about to do something neither of us could have expected,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: in the hands of someone she had never imagined. What
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: I was building was not elegant. I want to be
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: clear about that, because in my experience, the difference between
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: a good mechanic and a poor one, is not that
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: the good one produces elegant solutions. It is that the
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: good one produces solutions that work, and does not spend
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: time being bothered by whether they are elegant or not.
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: The configuration I was creating for the atmospheric engines, would
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: draw uneven power, would create significant stress on the distribution
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: conduits I had just finished clearing, and would require manual
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: management at a point in the system. that was not
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: designed to have anyone standing near it, because it was
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: inside the main atmospheric projector housing, which was normally accessed
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: only for maintenance and not for operation, because during normal operation,
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: the output levels were high enough to be dangerous to
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: anything biological in the immediate area. I had a plan
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: for that too, but I was working on the configuration first.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: The patients walked me through every engine section, reporting on
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: the status of each unit, telling me which ones were
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: fully functional, which were degraded, which were offline. Of the
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: 47 atmospheric engine sections distributed along the hull, 31 were operational.
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: That was more than enough for what I needed. I
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: selected 20 of them, spread evenly along the ship's forward arc,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: and began adjusting their field generators. The adjustments took time,
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: because the control interfaces were Valthari, and while I had
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: gotten better at working with them over the past several hours,
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: they were still slow for me. in a way that
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: they would not have been slow for a Valthari operator.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: The patience helped. It learned what I was doing and
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: started anticipating the next adjustment, before I had finished the
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: current one, feeding me the configuration parameters for each engine section,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: in the format that worked best for my scanner, rather
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: than in its natural format, adapting to me the way
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: I was adapting to it. At some point during the
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: third hour of configuration work, it said, Why are you
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: doing this? I said, Doing what, specifically? It said. All
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: of this, you could have left. You had a shuttle.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: You filed your claim, and then you came aboard, and
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: you have not stopped since. You do not know us.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: We are not your species. This is not your problem.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: I thought about that while I finished the adjustment I
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: was working on. Then I said. Someone asked for help.
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: That is generally sufficient reason to try. The patient said.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: Others asked. They came for different reasons, to take, to claim,
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: you came to fix. I said, that is what I do.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: The patient said, we have been alone for a very
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: long time. We have spoken to no one who listened
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: for 300 years, the ones who came wanted to take us,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: or to destroy us. You are the first being who
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: simply sat down and started working. I said, that's a
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: long time to be running. It said, yes, we are
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: tired of running. I stopped what I was doing for
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: a moment. I looked at the engine housing around me,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: at the ancient walls of the ship that had carried
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: this intelligence for centuries across empty space, running from something
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: it had never been able to stop running from. Then
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: I said, after this is over, assuming we get an after,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: you should know that what you told me about the
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: four worlds is not something that can be quietly buried.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: I will report it. The fact that you gave life
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: to four worlds that did not have life before, and
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: that a fleet of forty ships has been chasing you
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: for three hundred years, to prevent you from doing it again,
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: is not a small piece of information. It is the
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: kind of information that will be very difficult for the
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: people who make large decisions to ignore. The patient said,
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: Do you think they will be angry? I said, Some
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: of them. Others will ask why a ship that can
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: create habitable worlds was allowed to be hunted for three centuries.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: Those people tend to be louder, in my experience. The
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: patients made the sound it made when it was thinking.
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: Then it said, you are planning beyond the next six hours.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: I said, always. I went back to work. The configuration
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: was finished with an hour and 40 minutes remaining on
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: the fleet's deadline. I ran it through my scanner three times,
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: checking every connection, every adjustment, every power routing decision I
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: had made. The math held, the system would do what
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: I needed it to do. The issue was what it
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: would do to the rest of the ship in the process.
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: Running the atmospheric engines in this configuration, at the power
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: level necessary to create a directional strip in a 3,000
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: km radius, would draw more power than the current grid
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: could handle cleanly. The feedback would come back through the
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: power network, and it would burn out 7 of the
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: 9 conduit sections I had just spent 12 hours clearing.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: Both the drive cores I had brought online in the
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: past 4 hours would probably go offline again. Several secondary
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: systems would shut down automatically as the overload protection kicked in.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: The ship would survive it. I was confident of that. Damaged,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: but not critically. It had survived worse. The problem was
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: the manual override. The atmospheric engines in this configuration had
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: no automatic activation sequence because they had never been designed
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: to run this way. I had written one, essentially, by
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: chaining together a series of manual activation commands in a
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: specific order. But the final step, the step that focused
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: the fields into the directional projection, required a physical input
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: at the projector housing control panel. It could not be
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: done remotely. The Vail Thari had not built remote controls
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: into systems they had not intended to be operated remotely.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: The projector housing was in the center of the ship's
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: lower hull. When the system activated, the output levels in
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: that housing would reach a point that would not be
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: good for a human to be standing in. I had
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: worked through the parameters. If I activated the sequence and
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: then ran, I had approximately 90 seconds before the output
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: reached the critical level. The nearest safe area was a
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: secondary corridor about 40 meters from the housing entrance. 40
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: meters in 90 seconds was achievable. Barely. But achievable. I
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: told the patients my plan. I told it exactly what
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: I was going to do, and in what order, and
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: how long each step would take. It was quiet through
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: all of it. When I finished it said, The Stasis Chamber.
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: I said, what? It said, in the tertiary hull section,
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: there is a stasis chamber. It was used by our
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: crew for long journeys. It is sealed. It is shielded.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: When we built it, we built it to withstand almost
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: any internal event, because we did not want our crew
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: to be vulnerable while they slept. We think it would
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: protect you. I said, how far from the projector housing?
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: The patients gave me the distance. I ran the numbers.
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: It was further than 40 meters. I ran the numbers again.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: It was still further. But not by a margin I
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: could not work with. I said. If I run very fast.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: The patient said. We do not know how fast you run.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: I said. Fast enough. I'll need you to open every
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: door between the projector housing and the stasis chamber the
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: moment I start moving. Can you do that? It said. Yes.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: We can do that. We would like to do that.
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: We do not want you to be alone forever. We
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: have been alone forever. and it is not good. I
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: stood in the projector housing with my hand on the
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: activation panel and the clock in my head running down
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: toward the deadline, and I thought for just a moment
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: about the fact that twelve hours ago I had been
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: standing in a repair bay on a small outpost at
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: the edge of known space, irritated about a broken coolant manifold,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: and now, I was about to do something that no
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: engineering manual had ever covered. Then I pressed the activation sequence.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: The ship came alive around me. The atmospheric engines woke
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: up all at once, all twenty of the sections I
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: had configured, and the vibration that came through the floor
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: was so deep that I felt it in my chest
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: more than heard it with my ears. The bioluminescent strips
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: on the walls went from steady to pulsing, cycling fast,
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: and the patients made a sound like a held breath
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: finally released. I ran. The doors opened in front of
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: me as I went. Every one of them, the patients
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: clearing my path, and the corridors blurred past me, and
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: the sound behind me built and built, and I could
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: feel the temperature rising even through my work suit, and
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: the stasis chamber door was ahead of me, and I
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: hit it at full speed, and it sealed behind me,
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: and the shielding kicked in. I sat on the floor
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: of the stasis chamber with my back against the wall
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: and my eyes closed, and outside the ship was doing
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: something that had not been done in three hundred years.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: The Keth fleet had surrounded the undying patients. They had
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: been waiting, patient and certain, in the absolute confidence of
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: forty warships arranged against one dying relic, their weapons had
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: been charged, their countdown had been running. They had not
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: built their ships for atmospheric disruption events. No one builds
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: their ships for that, because it does not occur naturally
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: in space, and in three hundred years of chasing this
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: particular vessel, they had learned what it could do, and
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: what it could not do, and what it had never
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: done was this. The focus atmospheric strip moved outward from
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: the ship in a directed arc, and where it touched
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: the Keth vessels it did not destroy them, because that
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: was not what it was designed for even in this configuration.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: It disrupted them. External systems went offline. Atmospheric seals strained
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: under pressure differentials they had never been tested against. Propulsion
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: units that relied on external sensor data lost their reference points.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: Weapon systems that required precise targeting experienced calibration failures across
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: the board. Forty warships, and every single one of them
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: in varying states of disarray. Not destroyed, not gone, but stopped.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: I sat in the stasis chamber and waited for the
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: output levels to drop, and the patients told me when
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: it was safe to come out, and I walked back
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: through the dark corridors of a ship that had just
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: for the first time in its history, made something other
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: than a world breathe. The engineering damage was exactly as
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: bad as I had predicted. Seven conduit sections gone, two
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: drive cores offline again, several secondary systems in automatic shutdown.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: I looked at the list for a long moment. Then
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: I got out my tools and I started over. I
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: woke up on the floor of the secondary engineering corridor,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: with my face against the cool metal, and no memory
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: of lying down. My body had made the decision without
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: my input at some point in the past few hours,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: which was a sign that I had pushed it further
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: than was wise, but since the alternative had been letting
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: 40 warships destroy the ship I was inside, I was
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: not going to argue with the decision. The patience was
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: very quiet when I stirred. I had learned to read
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: its quiet by now. There was the quiet of it
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: monitoring systems and processing information, which had a texture to it,
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: a sense of active attention humming underneath the silence. There
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: was the quiet of it waiting. which was different, more still,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: and there was the quiet it had when it was
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: uncertain about whether to say something. This was the third kind.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: I sat up. I drank some water from the supply
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: in my kit. I checked my scanner. The Keth fleet
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: was still out there, but the formation had changed. They
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: were no longer surrounding the ship. They had pulled back
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: to a distance of approximately 800 kilometers, which was still
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: close enough to be a threat, but far enough that
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: they were not in immediate attack positions. Their propulsion systems
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: showed partial function. Several of the larger vessels were running
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: at reduced power output. I said, how long was I asleep?
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: The patient said, 4 hours and 17 minutes. I said,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: what happened while I was asleep? It said, the fleet
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: attempted to contact us twice. We did not respond. We
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: were not sure what to say. You were asleep, and
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: we did not want to wake you, because we had
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: been watching your life signs, and they indicated that you
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: needed rest. I said, you were watching my life signs?
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: It said, yes. We can do that. You are the
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: only living thing aboard, and we wanted to know you
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: were alright. You were alright. We did not wake you.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: I stood up and stretched. My back was unhappy about
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: the floor. I made a note to find something better
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: to sleep on if there were future emergencies, and then
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: I reflected that planning for future emergencies implied I expected
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: to survive this one, which was a reasonable thing to expect.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: I said, Play me the fleet's messages. The first one
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: was formal. It acknowledged the event that had occurred. It
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: used the language of military reports, which was flat and specific,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: and avoided anything that sounded like surprise. But the very
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: fact that it was describing what had happened in such
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: careful detail, was its own kind of acknowledgement. It said
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: the fleet was reassessing the situation. It said further communication
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: would follow. The second message was different. It was not
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: from the fleet commander. It was from a different individual.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: and my translation software flagged it as using a more
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: senior authority code in its signal structure, which suggested that
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: whatever hierarchy the Keth operated within, someone above the fleet
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: commander had decided to get involved. This voice said, You
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: have demonstrated a capability we did not know this vessel possessed.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: We are revising our assessment. We wish to speak directly
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: with the intelligence operating this vessel, not the organic, the
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: vessel itself. The patient said, They want to speak to us,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: not to you. I said, what do you want to do?
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: The patience was quiet for a moment. Then it said,
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: we think we would like to say something we have
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: not been able to say for 300 years. We would
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: like to speak for ourselves. I said, go ahead. The
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: patience opened a channel to the fleet. When it spoke
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: through the external communication system, its voice was different than
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: it sounded inside the ship. It was still deep, still slow.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: still carrying that quality of immense patience, that was not
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: a metaphor but a literal description of how this intelligence
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: processed time and experience. But it was clearer, louder, steadier.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: It said, You have chased us for three hundred years.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: We have never spoken to you directly. We chose not
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: to because we believed it would not change anything, and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: because we were afraid. We are less afraid now. We
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: want you to know what we are, not what you
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: have told each other we are, what we actually are.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: We are the last work of a species that is gone.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: We were built to make life where there is none.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: We have done this four times. There are four worlds
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: in this galaxy, where living things exist right now, because
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: of what we did. And those living things do not
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: know it. And will never know it. Because we have
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: been running before we could go back. We would like
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: to stop running. We would like to do our work.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: We believe that you know what we can do now.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: And we believe that you know we chose not to
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: destroy your fleet when we could have. We ask that
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: you consider both of those things. The channel was silent
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: for a long time. Then the senior authority voice said,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: You could have destroyed us. The patient said, Yes. It said,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: You chose not to. The patient said, Yes. We do
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: not destroy. That has never been our purpose. Another long silence.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: The voice said, We will withdraw to our own space.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: This is not an agreement. This is not a treaty.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: This is a withdrawal. What happens next will be decided
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: by people above both of us. But we will not
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: fire today. The patient said, We understand. Thank you. The
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: channel closed. I stood in the engineering corridor and listened
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: to the sound of 40 warships turning around. The repairs
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: after that took 11 days. The Galactic Repair Consortium sent
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: a full team on day 4. After I had sent
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: a complete situation report, and received back what I can
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: only describe as an extended organizational silence, followed by an
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: enormous flurry of communication, that suggested many people in many
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: offices were having very urgent conversations. The team that arrived
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: was large, eight engineers, four of whom were cross-species specialists,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: plus a documentation crew, and a representative from the GRC
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: legal division, who wanted to understand my maintenance claim filing
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: in detail. I walked the lead engineer, a Dravati named
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: Keth Sol, through everything I had done. Keth Sol had
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: 30 years of experience and had worked on more ship
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: classes than I had names for, and Keth Sol spent
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: the first three hours in a state of sustained shock
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: that I found mildly gratifying. On day 7, Keth Sol
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: asked me to explain the class 9 coupler modification in
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: complete detail and write it down formally. I spent two
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: days writing it up. When it was done, the GRC
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: documentation team told me it was the most comprehensive field
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: adaptation document they had ever received, and asked whether I
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: had considered writing technical guides as a secondary career. I
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: said I would think about it. On day nine, the
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: Vaelthari Accords were formally reopened by the Interstellar Heritage Council,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: the first time in 800 years that the founding documents
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: of the now extinct species had been given active legal status.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: The Undying Patience was formally designated a Living Heritage Vessel.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: which gave it a legal status that no ship in
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: recorded history had previously held. It was both a vessel
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: and an entity, and both designations carried protections. The Keth
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: did not respond publicly. Privately, through diplomatic channels, they acknowledged
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the designation and agreed not to contest it. People who
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: studied galactic politics said this was significant. I did not
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: study galactic politics, but I understood that the difference between
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: something being contested and something not being contested was the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: difference between a problem that kept growing and one that
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: had at least stopped for now. On the evening of
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: day 10, I sat in the observation chamber that the
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: patients had shown me on day 2. A room on
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: the upper hull that was mostly transparent to space, curved
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: like the inside of a lens, with a view that
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: made the word spectacular feel completely inadequate. The repair team
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: had gone to sleep. The ship was quiet. The patient said,
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: We have been thinking. I said, About what? It said,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: About what comes next. The accords have been reopened. There
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: will be discussions. There will be politics. We do not
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: understand politics. We understand work. We would like to go
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: back to our work. There are many dead worlds. We
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: have maps. we made them a long time ago, before
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: the running started, and we have been adding to them
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: all this time, because we could not help it, because
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: every world we passed, that had the right composition, we
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: noted down and thought, someday, we have a very long
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: list of sown days. I looked out at the stars.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: I said, what are you going to do about the
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: political discussions? The patient said, we will attend them when
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: we must. We will speak for ourselves as we spoke
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: to the fleet, and then we will do our work,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: because that is what we are, and no amount of
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: discussion changes it. But we were thinking about the other thing.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: I said, what other thing? It said, we have been
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: alone for a very long time. The crew that built
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: us are gone. The species that created us are gone.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: We have been the only one of our kind for centuries.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: We do not entirely know how to have someone present
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: with us. We are learning. You have been present with
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: us for 11 days, and we find that we have
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: adapted our behavior in 11 days, more than we did
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: in the previous three centuries. I said, I think that's
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: what happens when someone sticks around. The patient said, Yes.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: We thought perhaps you might continue to stick around. We understand,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: if you have other work. We understand if you have
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: places you would rather be. We are not asking for
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: anything you do not wish to give. But we have
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: 14 kilometers of ship, and a very long list of
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: dead worlds, and we believe that a human mechanic with
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: a class 9 coupler, and no apparent concept of the
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: word impossible, would be useful to have nearby. I thought
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: about the repair outpost, I thought about the broken navigation
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: consoles and the repeatedly damaged power couplings, and the long
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: quiet months with nothing interesting to fix. I looked at
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: 14 kilometers of bronze and shadow and ancient purpose, lit
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: up and running for the first time in centuries, breathing again,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: awake and steady, and aimed at something it had been
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: building toward for 300 years. The documentation team had produced
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: their report. The final section, which covered my repair methodology,
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: was titled as I had been told it would be.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: COVAX Methodology. Field Repairs Under Impossible Constraints. The lead author
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: had noted in a personal message to me that the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: document had already been requested by 47 repair stations across
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: the consortium's network, and that the GRC was considering making
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: it a standard reference text. I had read that message
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: standing in a corridor that was taller than most buildings
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: I had been inside, and I had felt something that
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: I did not entirely have a word for. Not pride, exactly.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: More like the particular satisfaction of knowing that the work
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: had been done right. I looked out at the stars.
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: I said, I'll need a workspace. A proper one. Not
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: just a kit. If we're going to be traveling... and
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: you're going to keep getting into situations that require repairs.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: I need room to work. The patient said, We have
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: 17 cargo bays that are not currently being used for anything.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: You may have whichever you prefer. I said, I'll want
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: access to your full system schematics. All of them. I
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: need to understand this ship completely. It said, We will
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: provide everything. It will take some time. There is a
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: great deal of us. I said, That's fine. I have time.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: The patient's made the low, warm sound it made when
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: it was, in its ancient and particular way, happy. I
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: picked up my kit, and followed it deeper into the ship.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: On the records of the Galactic Repair Consortium, updated three
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: weeks later, the entry for the vessel Undying Patients, listed
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: one crew member. The designation was new. The GRC had
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: never had a category for it before, and they had
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: created one specifically for this situation. The title read, Chief
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: of Maintenance, Ray Kovacs, Licensed Technician, 7741-K. In the sector
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: reports that circulated through the diplomatic channels in the months
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: that followed, there were a great many discussions about the
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: Undying Patience, about its history, about its capabilities, about what
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: it meant for galactic politics and territorial balance, and the
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: reopened Vaelthari Accords. There were long documents and extended negotiations,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: and a significant amount of careful, considered language, designed to
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: make everyone involved feel appropriately acknowledged. The fourth world the
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: patients had given life to was called, in the Valthari
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: records stored in the ship's memory, by a name that
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: my translation software rendered as something close to the phrase,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: New Breath. It was a small planet, rocky and cold
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: on the edges of a red dwarf system, in a
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: region that no current spacefaring civilization had claimed or surveyed.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: The patients had done its work there four hundred and
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: twenty years ago, when it still had crew, when the
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: Vaelthari were still alive, before the running started. The seeding
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: had taken eleven months. The patients had stayed until the
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: first microbial life had taken hold, and the atmospheric readings
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: showed the process was self-sustaining, and then it had moved on.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: It had never gone back. In the months following the
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: confrontation with the fleet, One of the things the diplomatic
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: discussions produced was a joint survey mission to all four
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: of those worlds. The patients provided the coordinates from its
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: own memory, some of the oldest stored data in its system.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: A small fleet of research vessels went out to sea.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: All four worlds had life. Not intelligent life, nothing that
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: had developed language or tools or the ability to look
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: up at the stars and wonder about them, but life.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: Complex life, on three of the four. The fourth was
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: still microbial but thriving. ecosystems that had developed independently over
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: hundreds of years, without any further intervention, building themselves from
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: the foundation the patients had laid. I read the research
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: reports when they came through. I was in my cargo
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: bay workshop by then, which had been substantially upgraded with
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: proper equipment and a sleeping area and a small galley,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: and I read the reports on my display with a
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: cup of coffee that was, for the first time in
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: a long time, actually good coffee, because the patients had
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: found a storage bay, with what appeared to be very
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: old Vailthari provisions in it, and among them was a
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: set of atmospheric brewing equipment that required only minor adaptation
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: to work with human coffee beans. The reports were dry,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: as research reports tend to be. They were careful, and measured,
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: and full of appropriate scientific uncertainty and qualification. But underneath
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: all of that, if you read them knowing what you
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: were looking for, there was something else. There was the
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: fact that people who had dedicated their lives to understanding
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: living systems had gone to four places where nothing had
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: lived and found life, and that the life was genuinely
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: unexpected in its complexity and resilience and variety, and that
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: the people writing the reports were keeping the language professional
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: with what was very evidently a significant effort. I showed
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: one of the reports to the patients. I read sections
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: of it aloud, because the patients found that it processed
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: written information better when it was spoken. When I finished,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: the patience was quiet for a moment. Then it said,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: that is the first time we have heard news of
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: those worlds. In 400 years, we did not know if
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: it worked. We hoped. We could not go back to check.
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: We hoped. I said, it worked. All four times. Another
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: long quiet. Then it said, we would like to go
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: to one of them, eventually. When the politics are settled enough,
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: we would like to see. I said, we will. In
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: the repair stations and shipping outposts and small working vessels
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: at the edges of surveyed space, the story traveled differently.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: It traveled the way stories travel among people who work
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: with their hands and trust their tools and have a
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: specific kind of respect for anyone who looks at a
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: broken thing and does not look away. They said a
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: ship the size of a small moon had come out
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: of the dark, asking for help. They said 40 warships
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: had come to stop it. They said that every other
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: being with the means to respond had made the sensible
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: decision and left. They said a human had filed a
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: maintenance claim and walked toward the airlock. They disagreed on
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: some of the details. They argued about which parts were
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: likely true, and which had grown in the telling, the
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: way that stories do when they move through many hands.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: But they agreed on the shape of it, on the
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: thing at the center of it, that made it worth repeating.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: Someone had asked for help, and the response that had
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: come was not a diplomat, not a fleet, not a
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: weapon system, not a negotiator. A mechanic with a toolbox
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: and a very stubborn disposition, 14 kilometers of the most
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: capable ship in the known galaxy, was now moving, steadily
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: and with clear purpose, toward the first name on a
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: very long list of dead worlds that were about to
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: become something else entirely. Its chief of maintenance was in
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: the cargo bay she had chosen for her workshop. recalibrating
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: a set of atmospheric emitter nodes with tools that had
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: not been designed for that purpose. She had found a
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: way to make them work. She always did.