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 longer than recommended 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 it had been since shortly after he was abducted, which felt like a lifetime ago. The vertigo and nausea caused by extended use were why he had implemented the use of units to track his time in the first place. Thinking back on it, singing the lyrics of songs, which he only vaguely recalled before learning about Melody deleting his memories, was probably not the best way to 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 nearly broke all of his efforts to suppress the anger he felt at its betrayal. Melody had apologized after his abduction. Why couldn’t it apologize for erasing parts of his memories?
He ignored the pulsing globe of light while he tried to wrestle his emotions back under control. As he was doing that, 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 darkly as he continued searching for specific parts. Venting some of his anger toward the people who designed and built Meldoy actually helped a bit.
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 clicked his tongue 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 provided him with information on how to fix broken stuff, but nothing on how to build something from scratch.
Jacob was going to have to figure that out himself. He picked up one of the simulated 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, including the arms and legs. 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, so there weren’t any parts that fit his needs for a torso or head.
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 to appear inside his virtual space. He assumed it was more difficult to generate something he had no actual experience with.
Jacob eventually got a body for his arms and legs that fit the bill.
It wasn’t anything special, and he could see a few issues already. The first was that it made his creation look like a walking trash can. Not entirely a deal breaker. The bigger issue was that if he went with the design, he would lose out on any sort of torso mobility. It might make locomotion more difficult as well. The one upside was that it would be super simple to make and assemble, being just a large rectangular frame.
Another issue was that the body was rather large. He intended to stuff it into one of the space suits to hide the fact that he was piloting a robot, but as it was, he doubted it would fit. He would need to refine the size to get everything to work, but that could wait for a bit. First, he had to decide on what type of material to use.
When he had built the battery carriers, he had sourced scrap metal to make them. Now that he had access to the station, he wasn’t limited by the small scale of Melody’s fabrication center. While he was trying to decide on the appropriate material to make the ugly rectangular torso, he had a better idea.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Jacob spent a few minutes re-picturing the body as a series of hollow cylinders, with the top and bottom being large enough to attach the arms, legs, and a sensor dome, or whatever sensors he decided to use in place of a head, that 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 would make the drone much more flexible, but only when turning.
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 out how to transfer his idea to the fabrication center, 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 a new part entry process. To switch between the two modes, 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?” he asked as a dizzying array of required inputs appeared.
“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.”
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 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 virtual 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 at the success.
Now he could produce his own parts 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 cursed 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.
He had spent the last two weeks trying to create a robot body for himself, only to run into multiple failures, which forced him to start from scratch more than once.
His ability to visualize a design significantly outweighed his ability to build it.
Jacob’s first major hurdle was wiring everything up, but it wasn’t the worst or only problem he was running into. Providing power was also a concern. Being much smaller than the maintenance drones, he wasn’t sure he could fit a power core into the drone he was designing.
After a lot of changes, he finally found a solution to that problem, which involved shoving a power core where the sun doesn’t shine. It was the only spot on the drone that didn’t move and had enough space to insert the power core. With that problem resolved, he moved on to something else he completely overlooked in his rush to make something cool-looking, like actuators, controllers, and a whole host of other parts that were required for everything to operate smoothly.
Jacob knew engineering was not for the faint of heart, but he never realized just how many things he needed to keep in mind when parts started to move.
The first design had too many segments and not enough room for the actuators. Perhaps smaller actuators existed, but if they did, they weren’t available on either Melody or the station’s parts lists, and designing one from scratch seemed beyond him, considering he was having a hard enough time putting existing parts together to make something work.
He cut the number of rotating segments down to two, which made the wiring a whole lot easier, as well as freeing up enough space to fit everything. Next, he added a central shaft to support the actuators to move those segments, which further reduced 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. When he powered it up, the drone managed to lift itself off the table, but it immediately toppled to the floor, where it flailed around until he stopped the simulation.
After more searching, Jacob found an electronic gyroscope used in the science drones. After removing anything not related to the gyroscope’s basic function, Jacob managed to fit it inside the torso so it could balance.
With that in place, the third test went 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, but that made it too weak to support the arms.
That was where he found himself at this moment.
He would have thrown in the towel at that point and found another solution, but the bipedal drone was a significant step toward his goal of freedom and keeping his humanity, so he kept at it.
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 stand on its own.
Jacob smiled broadly and wiped the fake sweat from his brow. He had done it. He held his arms out. “Come to me, Beautiful.”
He had spent far more time than he cared to admit thinking of a name to call it, but the drone responded.
The drone took one shaky step forward and then nearly pitched over as the gyro tried to steady it. The machine twisted its torso to try to rebalance itself, but there was a crunching sound, and the entire thing fell over and stopped moving.
“Are you kidding me?” he groaned and walked over to the drone to see what was broken.
It didn’t take him long to figure out the problem. One of the torso actuators had run into the gyroscope controller, breaking it. It was an easy fix. 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.
It was the first time he thanked Concord for making their simulation so lifelike.