Carol and I walked over to the remaining cryo- pods.  So the doctor could begin by examining the patients to see who we could bring back and what we would need for that process.  She was examining one of the pods when I got a report from the two drones I'd left inside the ship for exploration.

They had managed to fully catalog the rest of the ship.  They found eighteen more bodies.  Twelve were found in escape pods, six more were found manning the life support system for the ship.  The interesting thing is that all of their corpses were badly desiccated to the point where they would've had to have been down here for hundreds of years.  The second thing was that none of the escape pods were actually sent out.

Escape pods would automatically be ejected from the ship once they'd reached their capacity of six. Two of the escape pods have been filled, but were never sent out.  That means not only did the ship lose power, but everything up on the ship lost power at the same time.

The second drone reported that it had found the command deck was locked up tight.  The command deck can only lock up when it's under attack or imminent threat from crew or passengers.  The command deck also had its own cryo-pods so they can go into cryo-sleep.

"Dr. Carol, I have a few questions."  The doctor stopped examining one of the more heavily damaged patients and turned back around.  "What?  I don't have time for this right now, come back after I'm done."  She spoke to one of the medical drones.  "This one's going to need a spinal transplant and heart surgery if we're going to keep her alive when we get her out of cryo."

She kept on talking to the medical drones, going into more detail than I was able to follow.  I don't speak doctor apparently.

I decided if I can't talk to her now, then I'll go make a scout drone and send it outside the ship to see where exactly we are.  I went back to engineering bay and began work on the drone.  A few of the spider drones came out of hibernation and began helping me as well.  Scout drones look like a mixture of a dog and bat. While walking it looks like a mechanical dog with most of its steel framework showing and no covering for the outer shell.  The head, which is shaped like mine, is boxy with a single pane of glass in the front.

However, when it decides to fly its front legs will fold outward into bat-like wings.  It also has a round disc protruding from between its shoulder blades. This is the radar disc that slowly spins and gives back the data needed for exploration.  The drone, which I will now call rover, is two meters in length and stands at a height of ninety centimeters.  It was too big to build in one go, so I had to build a piece by piece.

Twenty minutes later, While I was working, the doctor came up behind me and screamed.  I turned around to see what had happened. The doctor was staring at one of the spider drones. I looked at it.

I then calmly spoke, "The drones okay.  What happened?"  The doctor huffed and said "It's nothing, I'm just afraid of spiders and those things look just like giant spiders.  It just takes me a second to realize that they're just drones."

"You are still backing up from them."  I watched as one of the drones walked by the doctor.  She grew even paler as she took a few steps back from the drones.

I chuckled "So,  what did you need?''  She had a shaky voice when she said, "I need an R2 reinforced medical bed."  I asked, "Why don't you grab one from the storage room?"  She shook her head and answered, "The ones in the storage room are two heavily corroded, along with most of the other equipment in there.  I thought since you had all these drones one of them would be able to take a look at the tables and repair them."

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While sighing, I said, "I'll just make a new one. Having one of the drones repair it would take too long."  Carol now looked mad.  "A new one?   That would take days to build!"

I pulled up the schematic on the R2 reinforced medical bed, and found it was way more complicated than I had thought.  It's meant to completely restore a human body, from broken arms to even a decapitation so long as you had both halves.  It would cure you of all ailments. I understood why she needed it. A few of the cryo pods had heavily injured humans inside, who would not make it if they were brought out now.

I began concentrating on the blueprint while the doctor stared at me.  Suddenly I felt's an emptiness that needed something.  And then it came to me.  I was hungry?  I looked back over at the crystals and saw them spreading outward slightly. Printer Bay one made contact with the crystals. The crystals latched onto the printer pulling it in off of its mounting with the loud noise of metal tearing. I watched as another printer was pulled in and I felt filled.

The crystals had just eaten two of the printers as well as the storage tanks containing a large assortment of periodic elements inside.  So, it seems I wasn't making things from nothing, I was making them from the storage materials of the printers.

I turned back around to see Doctor Carol taking several steps back staring at the crystals with horror. "What is that?!  What did that thing just do?"

Suddenly a bright light appeared in the room.  I turned around to see the folded up medical bed she'd asked for sitting on the print bed.

The doctor was holding her eyes.  I grabbed the operating table and brought it back to her.  She was blinking furiously trying to get rid of the afterimage from the flash.  "What was…What was that AI?!"

"I am not really sure, I found out by accident that when I try to send things to the printers, it makes them without printing them."

Carol looked at me incredulously, "So things have just been appearing in this room, and you haven't bothered to figure out why?" In reply I said "Well, only the things I wanted to build appeared.  Also, I've a lot of questions I need to ask you, doctor.   Such as where are we?"

"We're in Andromeda, and this was the very first inhabitable system we found. There were 250 colony ships and twenty-five warships.  Traveling through this sector, the plan was only to send fifty colony ships and five warships.  But things went wrong. When the fifty colony ship started to land on the planet, they all started reporting system failures.  Whatever happened all fifty ships suddenly lost power and plummeted to the planet.  Instead of landing, they must have crashed. Several ships broke up on entry.  At that point, we were already running towards our cryo- pods or emergency escape pods.  That was the last thing I remember. Now, let's get back to the equipment showing up out of nowhere."

I was surprised and asked "Wait I thought humans didn't have anything that could get us between the galaxies.  How did we end up in Andromeda?" Carol calmly said, "We got here the hard way, by spending a long time in cryo-sleep.  It was about 2300 years."

I was curious "So what happened to the rest of the colony ships and warships?" Carol look sad when she said, "I don't know, I was already in cryo- by time Klaxons on the ship started to fail and all the hatches started shutting."

Changing the subject, I said., "Well, whatever I'm doing to make things, apparently it requires raw materials in order to work.  So I'm going to order the spider drones to start dragging printer matter drums over to the crystals to see what else I can do.  But for now, do you need anything else besides the medical table?"  "No, I'm fine.  I'll be waking up my two assistants for now, but we will wait until the air scrubbers are fully repaired."

I started working while still speaking to Carol.  "Okay, I'll be working on the scout drone."  She smiled and said "Oh, okay, and what's your name, by the way?  I can't just keep calling you AI."