As you can probably imagine, the breadth of knowledge an eight-year-old has about history isn’t great. Despite that, and the fact that Yulia liked to go on random tangents, Alexander did actually learn some things.
He learned about a war that took place. Yulia only knew of this war because her father had served aboard a ship but the war had ended before she was born. He was curious as to the timeline of this war. Maybe it would explain how he ended up out here. Alexander would have liked to ask the girl some more pointed questions about her father, but he thought it wouldn’t be very appropriate considering she was an orphan. However, the girl didn’t get upset when she talked about her father... Perhaps some other time.
The girl knew quite a bit about the station, especially when it was first founded. He chuckled internally as she unenthusiastically recited a limerick, probably meant to help younger students remember the date better.
“In Gliese six-six-seven, so fine,
Stands a station that truly does shine.
Built in twenty-two eighty-nine,
In the cosmos, it firmly aligns,
A beacon of space, so divine!
The limerick was awful, but it did give him two pieces of information he didn’t have before. The system he was in and the year it was constructed. Was it worth it? The jury was still out on that as he continued listening to the girl's newest tangent on a game of tag that seemed to have no end and no beginning that she could recall. The game even had its own set of rules apart from other games of tag. The tagged person couldn’t retag the person who tagged them, and they also couldn’t tag anyone on that day. The tag had to be a surprise. Which made the person that was it, have a much harder time.
Despite that, Yulia said all the children loved it. He decided not to point out the fact that the game seemed purposefully designed to teach kids critical thinking skills and troubleshooting. What better way to teach that than to have the kids do it themselves and not realize it? If he ever found the person who thought up that idea, he would have to shake their hand and congratulate them.
Eventually, the girl started to go quiet and fidget. “Is something the matter?” He asked in genuine concern.
She paused and then shook her head slowly. “Just hungry.”
“Oh. Well, if you need to go and eat, don’t let me stop you.”
She shook her head again, her stomach rumbling slightly. “It’s not time for the evening meal.”
Alexander checked on the clock he kept in his mental space. It was after one, and the girl had been here for a few hours already. “Did you miss your lunch?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t kept the girl here only for her to have missed food. She was small enough that he doubted she could really afford to do that often.
“What’s lunch?” she asked in confusion.
“…Uh… It’s the meal between breakfast and dinner.”
She giggled at that. “Those are silly names. We get morning meals and evening meals. You must be super rich if you eat three times a day. Are you super rich?” she asked, her eyes going wide like she had seen a unicorn.
He made his holographic face, arch an eyebrow as he waved one of his arms around the room. “As you can see, I’m fabulously wealthy.”
She giggled again at that, only for her stomach to rumble once more.
Yulia did a good job of ignoring the rumbling but it was too much for Alexander. “Wait here a moment, I’ll be back.” Before he stepped out, he turned to the girl who was already standing on the stool and eying up what he had been working on. “And don’t touch anything.”
The girl, looking like she had gotten caught with her hand in a cookie jar, smiled but sat back down. “I won’t.”
“Uh-huh.”
A few minutes later, Alexander returned with a simple berry-flavored protein bar from one of the vending machines on the main passage.
The girl’s eyes lit up when she saw the colorful red wrapper. He handed it to her. Alexander was afraid her eyes would pop out of their sockets as she held the wrapped snack.
“Don’t get used to it,” he muttered and moved behind the desk. “Your rumbling stomach was just disturbing my train of thought.”
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If the girl heard him, she didn’t respond. She was too busy fighting the foil wrapper to get at the contents within.
He sighed again, plucking the treat away from the girl, and carefully peeled open one side before handing it back to her.
“Thank you!” she mumbled around a mouthful as she tried to bite into the hard bar. Which was probably made more difficult by the fact she was missing a few of her baby teeth.
He shook his head and returned his focus to his project, tuning out the girl's noisy eating. At least her stomach had finally stopped grumbling. It was unfortunate that the orphans only got two meals a day but he didn’t have the resources to do anything about that. Nor did he think it was his place to butt in. Honestly, most of the kids he had seen looked healthy enough, if a bit small and skinny. It wasn’t the skinniness of malnutrition though. So it was likely that whoever took care of them, did their best.
After finishing her meal, Yulia jabbered on for another half hour before getting fidgety again and wandering off.
It was probably for the best. Alexander didn’t dislike the girl. But he couldn’t sit here and entertain her all day either. Hopefully, she would soon lose interest in him and move on to other activities.
Not long after the girl left, Alexander finished the thing he had been working on. It was an upgrade to his printer. The thing about the 3D printers of the twenty-fourth century was that they were nothing like the ones from his time. Why should they be? There had been nearly four hundred years of improvements and tweaks to the process.
The only thing that remained from the early twenty-first century printers to the one he used now was their reliance on building in layers. But that was all. The new printers were faster, sleeker, and could print multiple materials all at the same time. They still left thin layer lines as they printed but it was nearly impossible to tell. The lines looked more like a slight texturing than anything else. You really had to look with a magnifying glass to see the truth. When he realized this, he looked at some other items and found pretty much everything with complex geometry was printed. Although you could tell better processes had been used for the original parts.
Alexander had been exposed to real manufactured goods from both his previous life and through his time working for Yuri. Not everything was printed, certain items likely still needed to be machined, or required specific secondary processes that printers just couldn’t perform.
One of those processes was called zero-g printing. The technique had been covered in an article in one of Yuri’s old manufacturing publications. It certainly wasn’t something he could replicate inside the station, assuming he could even figure out the method without purchasing a likely very expensive manual on the subject, but he thought he might be able to fake something similar if the name of the process was accurate.
The only reason he thought this was possible was thanks in part to all the manuals Yuri owned. Humanity, it seems, had only recently discovered artificial gravity. And by recently, maybe in the last hundred years.
Alexander had parsed this out due to the publications available for sale. The articles he found on the subject only dated back about seventy years. And the things were horrifically expensive. Like in the billions of credits for one document; that may or may not have what you were looking for. It was clear whoever had discovered the key to artificial gravity, didn’t want anyone else playing with it.
That was fine, Alexander wasn’t interested in artificial gravity. Well, that wasn’t true. He was, just not right now. He had learned a bit about the subject based on ship subsystems. Mostly from older models of ships that called for a capacitor buffer.
He had thought it strange to require a capacitor buffer at the time but the more knowledge he unlocked, the more he began to piece things together. It was odd. He wasn’t sure if this mental acuity was something that came from his time as a flesh and blood human or something strictly from the body he was housed in.
While he had muted emotions, it was still hard sometimes not to let the existential dread flood through his mind. Was he still himself? Or was he some amalgamation of man and machine? Did it matter? Was he truly any less Alexander?
He let those thoughts flit through his mind as he installed the small interrupter he had built. If his theory on how the gravity plating functioned was correct, this ring of copper and circuits should shield the area around it from the effects of gravity. Or at least the artificial kind.
Alexander clicked the last component in place and plugged in the wire to the control module. Then he stepped back and flicked the switch on. There was a blur followed by a loud metallic *WHOOMP*.
One of his articulated hands rose up and made a fist before thumping lightly on the top of his desk. The device had worked… sort of. He turned to where his broken printer lay crumpled in a heap against the wall, a wall that now sported a nice-sized dent.
It seems he only partially understood the concept of artificial gravity. And while he already had an idea of how to alleviate this issue, this mistake was going to be expensive. With an annoyed huff, he walked down the hall and purchased a new printer. His replacement was a much cheaper model than his previous one, but it was all he had the spare credits for. Selling his old printer for scrap to the station smelter netted him a small return. Just enough to keep him running for an additional month.
He decided not to do any more testing on his actual printer. Instead, he bought a simple lamp and used that to test with.
It was a good thing he had because it took three more tries to get the frequency correct so it would stop ripping the bolts out and throwing the lamp across the room.
By then another job had come in, netting him enough money to test his changes on the printer without worrying too much.
The test went well. The printer didn’t break the anchor bolts that held it to the floor, and he was able to print something without anything going wrong with his device. However, that’s when the second issue reared its head. The printer software was designed to compensate for a certain amount of gravity. It took Alexander two grueling days to adjust the settings to get the printer to function the way it did before his little update, which wasn’t great. No matter what he did, he realized this much cheaper printer did not have the ability to compensate for his improvement.
With a defeated sigh, he removed his upgrade and reverted the printer settings. His vision of improving the printer would have to wait until he could purchase a better model.