On the small interface display of the diagnostic box Faith bore unwanted witness to her teacher Dora Kinson bent over her desk and much much, so much worse, was her father, her married father, making her scream in such passion.

Faith dropped the diagnostic tool which thankfully ripped off the diagnostic led wire clamped to the data cable that had connected so horrible to the security camera in Faith’s classroom. She shivered in outrage at her father cheating on her mother.

It took her several minutes to calm down. Faith resumed repairing the junction box, it soothed her and she slowly melted copper wires together to make one continues piece. Twisting the wire togethers would just degrade the signals or stop it altogether. Faith didn’t connect the power cables together, for that she needed a to find or make a power regulator and a step up and step down voltage transformer. Until she had one just connecting the cables again would lead to another melted mess.

Finally, after connecting what she could safely, even the connection to that damn camera, Faith was finished for the day. Another day she would come and pull the defective cabling out, then tie the new cable up correctly. For now, it was as good as it would get. Sending the damage report, her repair of said damage, and highlighting the needed parts to finish the job correctly Faith called it a day.

Making sure all tools were secured to her belt Faith slowly crawled towards the access tube exit.

After leaving the cramped tube Faith stretched and then dusted herself off, leaving grime steaks on her coveralls. Faith did not want to go home, she didn’t know what she would say to her mother, or her father too. She decided to work on another project she only halfheartedly, till now, been working on.

Turning left down the corridor Faith walked through the twisting maze of metal tunnels to arrive at an elevator lift. Boarding she instructed to take her to Deck 61, one of the lowest decks. The station was built without any aesthetics whatsoever making the station look form the outside a plain metal box.

It was two hundred meters high, and five hundred feet in width and length. A massive volume of space but dwarfed by the Empire’s space stations built near its core worlds. Those could hold millions. The station was built to house half a million new colonists and all the supplies and manufacturing equipment they needed to build a thriving industrialized colony; that used the station as a jumping off point to mine and harvest the systems space resources for building materials and trade.

That had not happened in the Agraria system.

Instead, less then thirty percent lived on the station and the Agraria counsel wanted nothing to do with the outside world. The Empire of Thronos allowed them to isolate themselves for one simple reason, it allowed the Empire a place to send people who wanted to leave technology behind. Inside of having a group of people always being annoying and disruptive they had a place to send them to. Don’t like technology? What to live in a cave and work with your two hands? Go to Agraria. The Empire even paid for their travel fees. Out of sight and out of mind or something like that.

Not that they really lived in caves, only the most stupid of them did that, but they built their house by cutting down trees, making planks, and forge nails in homemade smithy’s. It was a real back to basics place. What was even more disheartening was there were staller systems living at that low a substance level, not by choice, but because they were too poor to build an industrialized system.

What was sadder still was a lot of these poor systems had metals and resources worth mining in space and if they had just enough money to get started, they would thrive. The hundreds of years old adage it takes money to make money was a true today as it was then.

It also sometimes was not because they were poor but that the government regime in charge would not let the system progress. A richer population may decide to rebel and that was too great a risk.

The elevator finally arrived at Deck 61. Decks 55 to 60 were overlarge decks to handle freight form ships and cargo pods. On Decks 61, 62, 63 were storage areas for the station’s supplies and equipment. Special cargo elevators could bring the supplies and equipment up and down from the freight docks for easy transfer.

On the last two decks 64 and 65 was the engineering spaces that supplied power, water, air, handled waste, and the trash of the station.

Stepping off the elevator Faith made her way down wide corridors that had storage areas behind wire mash roll up gates. The wire mash was only there to keep any items form spilling out onto the corridor. Sadly most of the storage areas were empty. All of Decks 62 and 63 was empty and they closed it off years ago to save power. They also closed down freight docks 55 to 58 leaving only decks 59 and 60 to handle what little cargo passed through the Agraria system.

Faith finally arrived at large bulkhead doors that were sealed and locked. Holding up her left arm Faith typed a code into the wrist computer and hit enter. After a few seconds hydraulics hissed and heavy thunks could be heard. After another few seconds the heavy metal doors parted and slowly slid to either side. Behind the doors a large thirty by thirty meter space was revealed with the overhead ceiling reaching almost four meters overhead.

This was a high security bay meant to hold extremely valuable metals like gold or palatium. Faith turned it into her workshop. Piles of equipment were in semi organized groupings scattered throughout the bay. In the far left corner Faith had erected walls the turned the corner into a five by five meter enclosed room that was her living space slash office slash workroom. It also had a bathroom with a real bathtub with message water jets that Faith had rebuild herself.

There were old fabrication unites and 3d printers that could manufacture pieces of equipment form circuit boards to chairs. They could not manufacture the newest tech and what they could produce was several generations old but they were reliable and Faith had made heavy use out of them. Along with that were the deconstructing and recyclers which could break down a piece of equipment or melt it down and save the materials for later use. Faith made her way through the maze of random pieces of equipment scatter around the bay and went to the back near her room.

Six months ago a freighter visited with four cargo containers of medical equipment that a large multi staller had given away. They used it as a tax write off and got more money out of it then if they had sold the old and worthless equipment. Old and worthless to them, the incomplete and shoddy inventory, if correct, were worth tens of millions of dollars out on the fringe. Yes the core worlds would look at it in derision but for the Agraria system it was goddess sent. The Agraria government paid only five million credits for the lot and even if less than a quarter of it worked or was made usable they still saved millions.

Thus the tedious job of going through every piece of equipment inside the containers begin. Even if equipment was found to be working it need to be cleaned, sanitized, maintenanced, and reconditioned. The amount of random stuff was truly breathtaking, ventilators to help people breath were mixed with heart bypass machines used in surgeries for heart replacements, along with surgical tools, hospitable beds, medical imaging machines, and autodocs that could perform minor surgery independently.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Slowly they worked their way through the equipment, sometimes using three to five broken machines to make one working one, other times just sending it to the recyclers. Even after six months they were still going through it, the station needed to much work to dedicate the time needed to complete the task. Still with only twenty percent gone through the Agraria government easily made their investment back ten times over.

Faith had heard some talk about setting some it aside to load into a shipping container and sell some of the newly refurbished medical equipment to neighboring systems. Faith would have been happy with the plan if she didn’t know the government would pocket most of the money for themselves.

What interest Faith was that buried under all the hospitable beds was a carefully packaged shipping container with a brand new medical bed inside. What was weird was large sections of the bottom of the bed that usually contained the computers that monitored the sensors built into patient beds was missing.

Faith couldn’t determine if they were removed or never installed. The bed looked brand new with the newest tech installed but for the life of her she could not see how it was a regular hospitable bed or even a very high tech imaging machine.

The bed was a large square piece of molded plastic two meters long, a meter wide, and a meter off the floor. Pieces were missing with gaping holes where they should be. Faith had not been able to activate the bed and did not know the right voltage and amperage so had made a voltage regulator along with a power transformer. When Faith was ready Sarah would slowly start powering the device and adjusting the voltage and amperage until the readings stabilized and if the power draw was more than what the power cable could supply the power transformer would provide the extra power.

The amount of power available was severe overkill, still Faith wanted to be prepared for anything. The power feed was not what had kept Faith form finishing the project but the data connections. The device used the newest NX-03A fiber optic cables with transfer speeds of one exabyte. From what Faith read the cables reached these speeds by having a thousand strands of fiber optic lines less than a quarter of the width of a human hair inside the NX-03A and each sub fiber optic line transferred one petabyte of data. Faith could only produce fiber optic cables four times the size of the sub lines and with one petabyte transfer speeds.

The other thing that puzzled her was there were two different data connection units. Each unit had four inputs and four outputs making the bed capable of receiving four exabytes of data and transmitting four exabytes of data simultaneously. Faith wondered just what kind of device needed that amount of data bandwidth.

Faith had carefully unbolted one of the data connection units and pulled it out revealing a circuit board that had a massive amount of data buffering units installed and eight of the newest three dimensional quantum processors installed. Faith’s puzzlement increased, why would anyone need such a massive amount of processing power and buffering units?

The back of the board also had eight NX-03A connecters and NX-03A fiber optic cables leading back into the device which gave Faith an idea. She disconnected the board and went to the fabrication unit. Placing the circuit board inside Faith instructed Sarah to carefully remove the front eight NX-03A connecters and then map the board’s circuitry and create a complete diagram of the data connection unit.

That had been two months ago. Her original idea was to install fiber optic connecters for the cables she was able to produce with her limited equipment in place of the NX-03A connections but Sarah had done a thorough job of investigating the board and was sure that it would not accept more than eight connections which would drastically reduce the amount of data that could be exchanged. Faith had come up with another idea that she thought would work but it would be a horrible kludged together device.

Faith was now trying her alternat plan. Using the NX-03A connecters and connecters for the one petabyte fiber optic cables Faith produced a data switching device without any processing units or data buffering units; it was just a way to connect the different fiber optic cables together. There were eight NX-03A connections on the left upper corner then the rest of the device had ten rows of a hundred one petabyte connections.

Faith had amassed eight hundred and thirty six computers form the patient hospitable beds, not the full thousand computers like she would have liked but close enough that she was happy with it. These units had low level AIs installed that monitored the sensors that scanned patients’ vitals and brain activity when they rested on the medical beds for any health issues. They could operate as a stand alone units but were almost aways linked to the hospitals more power AI’s computer systems that could predict when a patient needed medical attention well before the beds AI’s could.

Plugging in the hundreds of one petabyte cables was tedious but straight forward. After that Faith used the secondary backup data connections built into the hospitable bed computer units to connect hundreds of fiber optic cables to Sarah’s new computer server. Faith had manufactured a computer with three dozen older model three dimensional quantum computer processors, though they could not compete with the eight processors on the connection board, and added a massive amount of data buffing unites. Transferring Sarah form her old computer to the newly built one took only a few minutes.

Finaly Faith was done.

Eight hundred and thirty six one petabyte cables ran form Sarah’s new server to eight hundred and thirty six repurposed computers and another eight hundred and thirty six cables ran from those patient bed computers to the data switch device. Faith sighed in exasperation at all the cables snaking around the deck. She had tried to keep them together and somewhat organized but the share number of optical data cables made it difficult.

“Sarah how goes the integration into your new computer housing and the integration of the patient bed computers?”

“The new computer integration is complete and connecting to the patient bed computers is progressing. I have found the software embedded inside these computers inadequate to create a large distributed computing network. I have created new programs that make the integration and distribution of computer resources more efficient and quicker. I will note that the amount of computing power available is helping to improve and refine the new programs and also helping with the creation of other programs. I am creating a program that will drastically improve the amount of data I can send over a single one petabyte fiber optic cable by increasing the amount of data I can combine and multiplex into a single data stream.”

Faith blinked at that. She knew there were programs out there that could compress a data signal to allow for more data to be transmitted but it sounded like Sarah had found a way to cram more data into the existing data stream rather than compress it.

“Well that is good to hear Sarah. How long will the integration take?”

“The integration is already complete to a limited extent. As the computer programs improve the integration will become exponentially faster.”

“Yes the more the programs improve and evolve the better and faster the distributed computer processing power is and with that increase in computer processing power the faster the programs improve and evolve.”

“Correct.”

“So are you ready for me to connect the data switch device to the NX-03A cables from the bed machine?”

Sarah took a few seconds to process the question and evaluate the progress of the various programs running. After determining the cycle of improvements could run by themselves in the background without need of any oversight Sarah answered.

“Yes. Everything is connected and running properly I can see no detriment to connecting with the bed machine.”

Faith was excited to finally find out what the device was. The data switch device was next to the bed machine so all she needed to do was pick up the first of the NX-03A cables and connect it to the first NX-03A connection and then repeat for the other seven.

“Connecting to the power regulator. Testing voltages and amperages.”

Faith was tired after hours of work and also her back and limbs ached form the work. Sighing Faith seat down on the machine bed. Then tired and wanted to rest a little laid down on it. She stretched out and found the mattress surprisingly soft and warm.

That was Faith’s last thought as conscious left her.