Ellie spent the next few months planning her departure from the orphanage.
The world of her birth was half again as large as Earth and unique for having extremely large concentrations of metal in the crust. With so much metal easily available the world became the largest manufacturing plant in the UEN controlled sphere and in fact the largest manufacturing world in the galaxy. Correspondingly it was also the largest junkyard in the galaxy.
Why waste time, energy, and resources recycling when you could just throw it away and replicate a brand new part in minutes? With so much precious metals available every manufacturing corporation in the galaxy fought for a piece of the world, and fight continuously.
Hemwell was a war zone, each corporation a militarized zone that protected their mines with a private army. The UEN turned a blind eye to it as long as the military and consumer goods shipped out on time.
The last corporation that disrupted the UEN star port was bombarded form orbit by the UEN Navy and annihilated. Enough said.
That made Hemwell one of the most corrupt, blood soaked, worlds of the UEN, were almost anything could be found, or acquired, even Tier 2 nanites.
This gave Ellie hope; if she could find some nanites, she could repair herself, though it was a long shot. And she would have to stay far away from any active conflicts.
Hemwell was littered with junkyards, at places lacking in large concentrations of metal, worthless land to the corporations in other words.
Her studying provided a great junkyard location. On a rather large island, or small continent, the books said to look up a similar sized Australia on Earth, United Earth Nations home planet, was a land devoid of any large concentrations of metal.
Ellie found that the scientists were confused about this phenomenon when the rest of the planet had metal in abundance. For Ellie the reasons didn't matter, what did was that it was used by all of Hemwell as a major dumping ground. Corporations usually stayed far from the continent, but other dangers could be found, gangs, pirate hideouts, not to mention the dangerous trash she wanted to salvage.
Salvage that could explode in her face, from compressed air tanks, decompressing explosively, to spilled chemicals, needing the smallest spark to set them aflame, to unstable fusion cores, not shut down properly, a thousand dangerous and deadly traps waiting for an unwary salvager.
That did not include the still active defenses, waiting for an intruder. Ellie wasn't worried, she spent the last six years studying every technical manual she could get her hands on. Rosa had started her intense interest in machines and had helped her on course work.
She knew more about electronics then some engineers several times her age. She had learned advanced programming form Rosa and, in preparation for her journey, she had carefully hacked the low security databases of several of the largest corporations on the planet. Interesting many systems already had backdoors in them.
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Ellie just wanted to know about shipments to Cullen Island, the island named for some obscure explorer. Ellie also spent the months in intense study of different ship designs. She had read a lot about fusion reactors and every part of the ship over the years but she never really studied the actual deck layouts.
She download all the available layouts she could find, knowing she would need them soon. The good news was a lot of commercial ship deck plans were easy to acquire. The bad news was military ship designs were, of course, not as easy to find.
The three months since Rosa's announcement were well spent. By the time the date of sentencing arrived she was blurry eyed and foggy headed form the data cramming. She had never studied so hard!
On her birthday she packed the few cloths and items she owned, looked around her small bedroom for any missing items, then turned and headed out the door. When she arrived out the game room she found a few friends waiting.
Sarah Five rushed toward her crying. Sarah hugged her tight and Ellie tried not to cry with her. “It's not fair!” Sarah wailed distraught.
“It's okay Sarah. I'll be okay.” Ellie tried to console her friend.
One of Rosa bots came to take the girl. Ellie breathed deeply trying to steady herself and went to the other girls, giving each a hug and thanks and saying she will never forget them. After fifteen minutes Ellie finally turned toward the exit and left the only life she knew behind.
Exiting the bunker, Ellie's breath was taken away by the intense heat. The bunker's environmental plant never let bunker get to hot, so Ellie was not prepared for the hot dusty air. Taking a minute to breathe and look around, she could see low dull buildings all around her.
Spaceships of all sizes and configuration flew above her, picking up cargo on Hemwell, and taking them all over the galaxy. The street was busy and loud with people of all shapes and sizes rushing by. Ellie hid in the archway looking at all the activity.
She tapped a command into her pad, and it beeped, sending the designated rout to her bio implant. Every one received one when they were five. The implant acted as identification and tracking for kids and as adults it was used for banking and low level actions like map directions. With one final deep breath Ellie forged out.
Turning toward the star port Ellie started walking, several blocks away she crossed a dozen streets, weaving in and out of peoples way that were too busy to which for a small girl. She wanted to yell at a few of the worst offenders but was too intimidated.
A soft female voice she had programmed into her implant, to replace the annoying mechanical one, told her to take the next right. Turning, and going down a few buildings, her destination was across the street.
This posed another problem for Ellie because of all the cars speeding by. She could tell a lot were driven without the so called dumb AI engaged. Most AI's were very smart but limited and not allowed to evolve.
Turning around and, trying not to get swept away by the crowd, she back tracked to the intersection and pressed the walkway button. After a moment the walk light blink on, Ellie started to walk across but had to jump back form a barreling car that almost hit her.
Clinching her chest in fright, she looked around and no one seemed to be paying any attention. Fearing another incident she looked around and made sure the cars had stopped before racing across. Finally she arrived at her destination.
A bot was behind the desk asked. “Hello miss what can Express Packages do for you?” A polite automatic greeting programmed into it.
“I am here to pick up a package.”
Ellie sent over the receipt code that Rosa gave her. She had to decrypt it but she doubted anyone else could or cared enough to try.
“Thank you miss. Please wait.”
Ellie rocked gently on her the balls of her feet enjoying the cool air and silence. After a brief wait an auto cart loaded with several packages arrived. Ellie eyes went wide expecting only one small box.
“Your packages miss.”
Nodding to the bot she took off her backpack and started pushing boxes in, thankful for once the she inly owned a few items so there was plenty of space. Afterwards she turned to brave the outside.