Faith Harrigton finally arrived at the junction box after crawling through hundreds of meters of station’s access tubes. Removing the panel cover Faith cursed at the absolute mess of wires melted together. She knew it was the work of The Dick a completely incompetent and narcissistic jackass who was on the station’s maintenance staff.

When she was seven Faith pointed out the Richard “call me Dick” O’Conner was wiring a compartments air blowers backwards and instead of filling the compartment with new fresh air it would suck out the air. The Dick told her to run on home to mommy and leave the grownups to their work.

After four people almost died form that screwup he was demoted but not fired. Faith so so hated that man, this station, and this system. The station was a falling apart wreck because the system was dirt poor and the locals liked it that way.

Colonized by people who said technology should all be destroyed and humans should go back to living in caves they still demanded the highest medical care. Bunch of hypercritical assholes that hated what the station represented, humanities innovation and engineering strength, and wanted to see it gone but needed the station for the few ships that visited so they could trade for the medical supplies they desired.

Faith would like to see them live without modern medicine; in a week they would be yelling and begging to bring back technology. Goddess she was so done with the station and the people on Agraria. Next year, at fourteen, Faith could petition for adult status and leave on the next freighter out. That was one of the better policies of the Empire of Thronos; adult status was not granted at an arbitrary age but needed to be tested for, starting at the age of fourteen and then if the person failed retrying every two years afterwards.

The decision was made without bias or prejudice and was taken on a computer, evaluating a person’s knowledge, psychological profile, and economic predictions. You needed to have basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills which you could pass with two years of schooling if you studied hard enough.

The test also found any psychological problems that might inhibit you form functioning independently in society or maybe harmful to society. Not that they jailed you for being a danger to society, usually the Empire recruited you for one profession or another. Sociopaths were found to make great spies.

The economic predictions were trickier, it encompassed your knowledge, your learning speed, your habits, psychological profile, even your sexual orientation, to make a prediction on how financially successful you may become and any economic impacts stemming from your financial success. More then one major corporation was started with grants given by the Empire to people who were predicted to succeed.

Did all the predictions turn out to be current? No. But the successful ones made up for the failures, just one multi staller system, multi trillion dollar, company could make up for millions of failures.

Faith was counting down the days until she could take to test. She aways wondered just how The Dick had passed the test. Faith had a bet with herself that he had to take it multiple times. Chuckling softly in the confined space she looked at into the junction box and the more she saw the worse it got.

The Dick had run a replacement cable leading off to the right down the access tube and disappearing into the distance which would not have been so bad if he removed the old cable and installed the new one properly. Instead, the lazy s.o.b ran the line on the deck and just left it there free. Worse the new cabling was the wrong voltage and wire gage. 

Faith wasn’t unused to seeing non compatible parts kluged together, half the station was repaired by parts bought form ships that finally cleaned out their storage rooms and out of the way spots they piled their junk in. Small independent traders were notorious for being hoarders, replacing parts but saving the old ‘just in case’ until it piled up too much and they sold it the cheapskates in the Agraria government, such as it was.

What The Dick should have done was add a power regulator and a combination step up and step down voltage transformer to manage the differing voltages form the old cable running into juncture box form the left and the new cable running off to the right. Instead he had wired them into the panel and now it had overheated and melted into a right mess.

Worse still was the new cable didn’t use standard Empire color coding meaning it could have come from one of the hundreds of other staller nations or individual staller systems out there. At last count there were one hundred and eighty eight staller nations that comprised of two or more stellar systems which totaled sixty percent of the estimated one thousand two hundred stellar systems humanity had colonized. The other forty percent were single polity stellar systems usually found on the very fringe of the larger staller nations. 

Sighing, and giving a little prayer that The Dick had documented his work, she brought up her left arm where a wrist computer was running the length of her forearm, only seven inches long by three inches of flexible plastic. Tapping an icon on the display Faith connected with her home computer.

“How may I help you Faith?” Issued form the wrist computer. 

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

It was Sarah, pronounced Sar Uh and not what most people on the station insisted on saying Sar Rah, was a home built knock off AI. Faith couldn’t begin to afford the cost of a real AI and its hardware requirements and fully sapient AI’s were legally protected in the Empire.

Sarah stood for Self Learning, Adaptive, Recursion, Heuristic AI. It was kluged together, like most things on this station, with different piece of coding she could found on the staller network.

Faith had modified the adaptive coding to balance out the heuristic algorithm, which found the fastest solution to a problem, even if it was not the best or optimal solution, with the recursion algorithm, which broke down a problem to the smallest part ( if faith asked it to find home the recursion algorithm would break it all the way down to ‘Take one step forward’ and so on and so on ) the last part was what made the AI an artificial intelligence, the Self Learning coding.  It could learn and remember what it learned. It could build on those memories to make better choices and be more efficient.

Already, despite the limits of the hardware imposed by Faith’s lack of funds, the AI was slowly rewriting itself so the disparate coding was more streamline, efficient, and completely utilizing its limited resources to the fullest. Faith had already seen the improvements made to the adaptive algorithm with the AI learning to use it to balance the divergent algorithms of recursion and heuristic better and more efficiently.  

At first the AI chose one algorithm or the other or used both at the same time, drastically slowly it down and coming up with disjointed solutions that wouldn’t work, now it could blend the two together seamlessly and Faith received a fast, optimal, fully mapped out solutions and alternative solutions to her problems. It was goddess sent to help her keep the station up and running.

“Sarah can you found out if Richard O’Conner reported how he wired this junction box?” By station regulation every repair needed to be maliciously document and Faith always uploaded a step by step report of her repairs and also sent it to Sarah for evaluation and feed back on how she could have repaired the hardware better and more efficiently. Sarah was steadily teaching her to be a better engineer then years of classwork and working on the garbage heap of a station.

“I can find no report of repairs made in access tubes L14-A1024-J1099.”

Faith sighed long and hard. Of course The Dick didn’t document the repairs. Faith had complained before about his shoddy reporting and been told that as a volunteer and work study engineer that she did not have the authority to question someone who had been working on the station for longer than she was born.

Faith sometimes really really regretted the circumstances that led her to wanting to be an engineer on the station. Not only what happened but her later determination to repair the station despite every opposition. She still remembered the day when she was five, happy and care free, getting on the elevator to see her father.

A short in the electrical wiring trapped her inside for hours, worse, the short randomly shot the elevator in different directions, one minute it would be perfectly still the next it would rocket upward only to reverse and slam down.

Faith had a broken arm, a leg, and a concussion before they finally freed her, she was lucky to be alive. After she recovered, she investigated everything about elevators, becoming obsessed with them until she learned everything there was to know. This led her to start learning engineering.

School was mostly AI taught on the staller network, in a school room with other kids and a teacher there mostly for physical presence, though sometimes kids needed real help with problems. Since there was not enough student or teaches all grades were in the same compartment so learning advanced engineering was easy at the self learning pace set by the children’s own drive to learn. 

“So the hard way it is.” Faith said rhetorically. Sarah was advanced and practiced enough to know this was not a question to her.

Faith pulled out her small bag of tools, cutters and clippers and a foam that would dissolve plastic would allow her to remove the melted mess, and clean the site up for a proper repair. Slow and carefully, she cut the wires at a point that wasn’t damaged by the heat and soon had all the wires snipped. Next, with the good wires pushed aside, Faith used the foam to dissolve a good portion of the mess away. Now there was still melted bit of copper and Faith pulled out a small torch and chisel. Heating the copper up just enough to melt, the junction box was steel so its melting was significantly high then copper, Faith chiseled the remains away.

Waiting for the cleaned junction box to cool, Faith packed away her tools.

After it cooled, Faith pulled out a device hanging from her belt that would measure the voltage and amperage for the power contactors, it would also send a ping out that Sarah would track though the station systems that would find what operating consoles the connecting cables went to an what they operated, Faith prayed to the goddess no fusion reactor systems were controlled through this junction box, the wires that passed data through it would read the data packet and send them to Sarah to determine what wires went were.

It would be embarrassing to hook a command channel to the waste monitoring systems, Faith would never live it down, especially not with The Dick probably gleefully reminding her, and everyone else, of the mistake.

Faith clamped a wire with the lead wire coming out of her diagnostic box. Sarah was connected to the box wirelessly through her wrist computer so the readings were triply saved, the diagnostic box always saved its readings, Faith’s wrist computer saved copy, and Sarah needed a copy to help Faith with the repairs.

Redundancy was the staller mark of a good engineer.

A short scream of passion issued form the diagnostic box interface display and Faith looked down at it expecting to see a porn vid streaming, it had happened before and would again. On the tiny display of the diagnostic box it was hard work out what she was seeing. It was shot form high in the corner of a room giving a full wide angle view of the total area making everything look even smaller, it looked very similar to her classroom. Faith was still trying to puzzle out why this was when another scream of passion overloaded the cappy speaker inside the diagnostic box, it was not made for sound, and the sound distorted.

Looking at a left hand corner of the display a very tiny image of two people were captured on camera. Faith in curiosity squinted at the display trying to see what was happening. She wished she hadn’t.