Jacob popped out of the drone at the station and back into his virtual space. The transition was a bit rough since he had spent far more time than usual inside the machine. A short wall appeared, and he braced himself against it to steady himself.
That wasn’t his first time experiencing the effects of prolonged connection to the drones, but it was the worst he felt in quite some time. The vertigo and nausea were why he had implemented the use of units to track time in the first place. Thinking back on it, singing the lyrics of songs, which he only vaguely recalled before learning about Melody’s actions, was probably not the best way measure the passage of time. Then again, it worked, and it also helped pass the boredom.
“Welcome back, Captain,” Melody said without a hint of apology in its tone.
Jacob didn’t know if the AI could feel true empathy, but not even acknowledging its mistake irked him. Melody had apologized after his abduction. Why couldn’t it apologize for erasing parts of his memories?
He ignored the pulsing globe of light as he brought up his custom fabrication center interface.
“That doesn’t appear to be a standard-issue interface, Captain. Is there something I can help you locate?”
“Is that a problem?” Jacob snapped at the AI.
“No, Captain. I don’t have any records regarding the rules of modifying interfaces. In fact, I would assume it was commonplace given the multiple species that were aboard.”
Jacob didn’t want to agree with the AI, but it seemed like a plausible conclusion. If everyone modified the interfaces to their liking and nobody was meant to use the base interface, it would certainly explain why the standard version was so bad.
“Probably built by the lowest bidder or some intern,” he muttered as he continued searching for specific parts.
Once he found something that looked like it would work, he threw the window off to the side. When the item appeared inside his virtual space, he pumped his fist. He wasn’t sure that would actually work, but he figured it was worth trying.
“I don’t understand why you would need to visualize the part inside your construct, Captain.”
“I’m building something. Don’t you have something else you could be doing instead of bothering me?”
“Until the ship is fully repaired, I’m carrying out my primary role, Captain, which is to assist the crew.”
Jacob groaned at that. He wasn’t going to convince Melody to leave him be, so once again, he went back to ignoring the AI as he threw more parts into his virtual space. Melody must have gotten the hint because it went quiet as he worked.
Once he had all the parts he thought he might need, he spread them out on a newly appeared worktable and scratched his head.
Most of the parts were robotic armatures from the maintenance drones. He wanted to turn them into a skeleton, sort of. The problem with that lofty goal was the fact that he had no idea how to engineer such a device. The most complicated thing he had built had been the little carrying case for the battery.
That wasn’t exactly an engineering marvel, and the information Melody had given him wasn’t much help. It gave him a bunch of information on how to fix broken stuff, but nothing on how to build something from scratch.
Jacob was going to have to figure out this mess himself. He picked up one of the arms and the replaceable socket joints that it attached to, then he just started sticking things together to see what he came up with.
After a few hours, he had a rough approximation of a human skeleton, including the arms, legs, and spine. None of the parts were connected to anything, however. The aliens who had built Melody and the station never considered that someone would want to build a robotic skeleton. It was just another instance pointing to their lack of imagination.
As he was studying the mess of parts, he got an idea. He pictured a rectangular support structure to attach the pieces to in his mind. Unlike the short wall and worktable he had generated, it took more effort to get the desired result. He assumed it had to do with the fact that the support structure was something new, while the wall and worktable were based on things he had experience with.
It took some effort, but Jacob eventually got a body for his arms and legs to attach to. There were a few issues with the new body that he noticed immediately. The first was that it made his creation look like a walking trash can. He planned on covering the whole skeleton in one of the space suits he had seen during his repair work, so that wasn’t really an issue. If he went with the design, he would lose out on any sort of torso mobility. The one upside would be that it would be super simple to make.
The second issue was that the body was rather large.
When he had built the battery carriers, he had sourced scrap metal for them. While he might be able to find the appropriate material to make the ugly rectangular torso, he had a better idea.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Jacob spent a few minutes re-picturing the body as a series of cylinders, with the top and bottom being large enough to attach the arms, legs, and a sensor dome, or whatever sensors he could fit inside one of the space suits.
By attaching each section with a larger version of the rotator found on the arms, the body could now rotate. The change also ensured that the individual sections were small enough for the fabricator aboard Melody to produce.
He selected the largest part, which happened to be the hip section, and dragged it over to the floating fabricator interface. Simply shoving the item into the interface did nothing. He could have sat there and stubbornly beaten his head against the wall until he figured it out, but he had a readily available resource; he might as well use it.
“Is there a way to enter new designs into the fabricator, Melody?”
The interface blinked out, and a new, much more detailed interface appeared. “I assumed that would be your goal, Captain. As you were working, I took the liberty of updating your interface to include the new part entry process. To switch between the two, just select the icon on the far left.”
Okay, Jacob had to applaud Melody for that. “Thank you. Um…why are there so many fields?”
“For the fabrication center to produce reliable parts, it needs the full mechanical profile of every material involved. Things such as tensile and compressive stress curves, shear limits, thermal expansion coefficients, deflection characteristics under dynamic load, and how those values drift with material wear, etc. Without those values, the end result could not be considered safe.”
Jacob wasn’t dumb, but he wasn’t an engineer either. “…Right. What if I just told it to use steel?”
Melody paused, almost like it was silently sighing in exasperation, before continuing. “Captain, there are hundreds of different alloys of steel.”
He knew there were a few, but he had no clue there were that many. Then he got another idea and switched over to the part catalog. He ran through the list until he found the maintenance drone's front plate. He knew that part was rather robust, and he was pretty sure the rest of the maintenance drone’s body was made from the same material. “Can you transfer the material list from this to my new part?”
Another pause from Melody, and the interface almost reluctantly shifted back to the entry form, with all the data filled in. With that done, Jacob pushed the new design into the open window, and it vanished from his hand.
He gave it an easy-to-remember name, instead of the asinine multi-digit part numbers every other part had, and pumped his fist in celebration once again.
Now he could produce the part to specification rather than having to cobble something together from scraps.
With that problem solved, Jacob got to work on the hard part, wiring everything together.
***
Jacob cussed for the fourth time that day and threw the tool he was using across his virtual space. A dartboard appeared before it could impact anything, and a celebratory chime sounded, followed by a little confetti pop as the screwdriver equivalent hit the bullseye.
He was cheating, but it didn’t matter.
It had been two weeks since he set out to create a robot body for himself, and he had been forced to start from scratch multiple times.
Mostly because his ability to design outweighed his ability to build. He thought wiring everything up was going to be the biggest problem, and it was high up on that list, but it wasn’t the worst problem. The biggest issue was providing power for everything.
His solution to that problem was to shove a power core where the sun doesn’t shine. There was actually enough room between the legs to do that, but then he had to include things like actuators, controllers, and a whole host of other parts he had completely overlooked in his rush to make something cool-looking.
The first design had too many segments and not enough room for the actuators. He cut that number down to two segments, which made the wiring a whole lot easier. Next, he had to add a central shaft to support the actuators, which cut down on the available space, but did give him a convenient place to mount components.
Jacob actually finished that design and even tossed a full sensor pod on top as a proof of concept. The end result managed to rise off the table and immediately fell to the floor, where it flailed around until he stopped the simulation.
After more searching, Jacob found an electronic gyroscope used on the drone ships. With great effort, he managed to fit the stripped-down device into the hollow torso along with the other components. The third test went a bit better. The bipedal drone managed to stand up for a whole ten seconds before one of the articulated appendages it used for legs folded under the weight.
The third iteration replaced the steel body with some high-strength aluminum. Finding the right material to fill out the data sheet had been a nightmare, but he did eventually locate what he needed.
The body was much lighter now, but it still wasn’t light enough. Jacob was forced to remove more material from the aluminum to make it work, but that made it too weak to support the arms.
The repeated failures were extremely frustrating. He wanted to give up and just use the damn maintenance drone to communicate with whoever he needed to on the new station, but he couldn’t for two reasons. The first was that he wanted to walk around in a real body again. It was a selfish reason, and he knew it, but he didn’t care. The second reason was that the maintenance drones were too large to fit inside most of the transport craft, and the vessel wasn’t equipped with remote piloting. That was probably why the ship was left behind in the first place.
Eventually, he reached a compromise where the aluminum was thick enough, yet light enough, thanks to the addition of strategically placed holes, that the drone could actually stand up.
Jacob smiled broadly and wiped the fake sweat from his brow. He had done it. “Come to me, beautiful.”
He had spent far more time than he cared to admit coming up with that name, but the drone responded.
It took one shaky step forward, and then nearly pitched over as the gyro tried to steady it. The machine tried to help by twisting its torso, but there was a crunching sound, and the entire thing fell over and stopped moving.
It didn’t take him long to figure out the problem. One of the torso actuators had run into the gyroscope controller, breaking it. He added limiters to the torso rotation and reset the model. He was glad he could test everything virtually before committing to a design. Otherwise, it could have taken him months or years to put something workable together.
Jacob had to trust that the Concord had designed their virtual spaces to simulate the real world perfectly, or he was going to have to go through more testing with a real robot. He shuddered at the thought.
