“Hey, guys,” I said. “This is going to change the game.”

In the grand scheme of things, I never expected that my current excursion would amount to much. Then, deep inside a donut of alien design, trying to get my bearings on things, everything started to click.

I was streaming a live feed of the inside of the donut. It was one hundred percent a space engineer's dream.

An actual habitation ring. Hot dog, we’d done it. In your face, science fiction!

However, what was off was that there was a metric ton of debris. If this was an actual ancient habitation, would there be debris?

The drone itself was a circular orb with eight jets around each side. This base drone was designed after a deep sea probe. If you can imagine a deep water searching drone, you’re not too far off. Convergent design was a thing, as Eric continually told me as he stole other engineers' work. It drove him nuts that he hadn’t been uploaded with a complete set of every textbook he had been working off as well as basically every drafted design made by humanity ever. It drove him nuts, but he would never tell anyone.

Back to the debris floating around my drone. The big thing that had been holding me back thus far was the long tether between my EXODUS probe and the drone itself. The debris near the largest entrance we found shouldn’t have been a problem but I didn’t want the tether to get cut. My baby drone wouldn’t survive long out there, and since I didn’t have a crew of meatbags to send in to do my dirty work, I had to do things manually. This brought the question though.

“FERMI, can you explain some of this debris? I wasn’t expecting a miraculously intact alien space ship as a prize, but …?”

“ERROR, INSUFFICIENT DATA.”

Well, that was peachy. I needed to adjust my expectations. It made sense for large astral bodies with mass to have a strong gravitational pull, which could explain why so many pieces were near-almost stuck to the large exit.

Then right in front of the camera, the light showed something close. A body. Four limbs, vaguely humanoid but where a head should be…the suit was missing that part. Right nearby the body a detached head also floated. What an auspicious way to start this mission.

This was going to be an interesting report.

“Are you going to write a first contact report? Or should I?” Eric said, his voice shaking me out of my concentration.

“I think that we could make this one a group project,” Stevie replied.

Oh, right, I was still live streaming the whole ordeal. Of course.

I snapped my attention back to the body. This clearly wasn’t human. It was bipedal, clearly humanoid, but not the bright green alien. If you had told me that I was going to meet a space dwarf, I would have laughed at you, but the body was a bit short and on the stout side. The head itself…

“Hey guys, mind if I just do my thing here, without the running commentary?”

The head floating around-which could have been from another body just to be clear- was decidedly not human. The only thing that made me think human was the bluish pink hue that it was.

When a person dies, there are a whole slew of things that happen to their body. Rigor mortis and all that, something that a casual medic is familiar with. I was not a casual medic so I had to go back to my teammates that had gotten some medical training in their military careers to make sense of it.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Hey, guys would a human head turn blue or purple after death?”

“I can’t see why not. Oh, yeah that,” Stevie said, “Hmmm.”

The drone had two arms I had been using to gently move the debris around. I extended one to the body, turning it around. I nudged it and I got a view of the suit it was wearing. It was what I am going to call ‘light’, as if they had decided that a nearly skin tight suit was worth creating. Not that I knew the anatomy of the corpse. Xenobiology was a bit out of my realm, but it was time to put on my science hat.

“Fermi, take some measurements of the corpse. We’ll overlay that with the head. Give me an approximate height and mass.”

“Aye. Calculating. Based on organic matter present, it is estimated to be between one point three and one point five meters in length and one hundred and twenty kilograms in mass.”

“That’s a biggun,” Eric said, “You guys see this estimate?”

FERMI brought up a 3d overlay that gave the picture of the corpse as a single unit by mashing the two pieces together. I had to admit that it was on the short side.

“Short and stout?” Stevie asked, “They’re probably good at ground fighting.”

“They’re not dwarves,” I said.

“I never said that, now did I. Don’t disrespect our dead dwarven friends though.”

“I’ll pour out a tankard of ale for them chief,” I deadpanned.

“We’ve got to think about what kind of society does this to their own people, or if this was an external threat, than who are the warring powers,” Stevie said, “and more importantly do they have better spaceships than us-”

“-and can we steal them,” Kiernan said, cutting in.

“Hey! That’s my line,” Stevie replied.

“If we’ve had enough, I’m going to continue my search here.”

“Go ahead, Levi.”

“When I’m done, I’ll be writing the first ever field manual for Xeno archaeology. I hope you’ll all buy a copy.”

“I want a signed one!” Kiernan said, her voice chipper.

“Granted,” I said, “Now let me get some of this field work done with this large amount of debris, so we can head in and take out turns playing tourist slash grave robber.”

Mentally I was trying to absorb the amount of metal debris that was still contained inside of the hull. It didn’t make sense for it to still be here. The donut itself was cracked open, and for the debris to… it just didn’t make sense. We were out near the Kuiper belt equivalent of this star system, but there weren't any asteroids. It

The slick grooves of the interior of the spaceship made me think that someone had really spent some time on it. Thinking about it though, they could have left it to an artificial intelligence and tweaked the results. Throughout my teenage years, people had sounded the alarm bells about AGI, the artificial general intelligence that kept being a constant near future threat. Then my mentor started the trend of uploading humans into machines. I think that it had been kept quiet, but I had a sinking suspicion that other AIs might fit a little more into the ‘aggressive saviors of humanity by destroying it’ camp. AIs like myself could design such structures given our extended lifespans, the time to do so would be trivial.

Eric himself might be able to create such a thing with a computer aided design program, given enough time. Of course he was on sea duty, his assignment to become the best asteroid he could be taking priority.

I say might, because I trusted in his ability and if I even mentioned such a thing, he would probably take it on for real. I didn’t want him working on that, when I had so many projects that I did want him to work on instead.

Around my camera, the small drone I’d left on a tether from my EXODUS probe, the debris looked pretty unmoving. The habitat itself had a slow wide orbit around this system's sun, and it felt like a miracle that we’d found it on our initial survey.

There were large doors, hallways and what looked like hundreds if not thousands of living spaces. All I was looking for was to see if there was anything that would fight back, or some sort of booby trap that was above my paygrade. I want to tell you that I wasn’t the traps guy on the team. Eric was a combat engineer, he should have been the trap guy, if anyone was.

I was the robotics guy, unfortunately. This didn’t mean much when I was the low man on the totem pole. Well, it didn’t mean much and it wouldn’t mean much until I had my swarm of tiny robots that I would be printing just as soon as we got all the basics out of the way.

It would just be a little bit easier if I had the foresight to bring a bunch of ten foot poles and some bubblegum. I was here to chew bubblegum and conduct an xenoarchaeology dig and I was fresh out of bubble gum.