Max was tired. As much as he wanted to play with his new AI toy, he simply wanted it to control some of the ship's basic functions while he slept.

"Lexi, it's a pleasure to meet you finally. I would love nothing more than to have a nice chat and get to know you. But I'm exhausted. I've been staring at code all night, and I can't even see straight. I'm going to go to sleep in the captain's quarters. Can you make me a sleepytime tea and play some soft music to help me sleep?" Max said.

"If you're having problems with code, I am fully trained in all of the main coding languages, so perhaps I can take a look?" Lexi offered.

"Sure, go at it," Max stammered out. He was so tired that he'd forget that he had given her permission later on.

And with that, Max went to bed, sipping hot tea and listening to gentle music.

When he woke up, his world had completely changed.

"Good morning, Doctor Martino. I wanted to-", Lexi began.

"Please, call me Max.", he interrupted.

"Oh, OK. Good morning, Max. I wanted to tell you I fixed the problem.", she continued.

Max stopped for a second, searching his brain. What problem was she working on? What did she fix?

He scrambled out of the ship and into the lab again, looking at the computer on the table. He ran for it, examining the check-in logs to the source control. Indeed, dozens of code check-ins were made under Max's name in the last few hours while he slept. And all the main unit tests continued returning green. Even hundreds of new unit tests were added, all green.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"What did you do?", a pale Max stammered out.

"I fixed it. What you were trying to do should work now", Lexi said proudly.

Max installed the latest code into the foldable space drive engine itself. He ran it in test mode, and apparently, a stable warp field was generated. He sat there, dumbfounded, for several minutes, checking and rechecking the data.

"Oh, but Lexi. This means very little! The space drive shows it should work. But we won't know it will work for sure until we run the engine properly!" Max said way too excitedly.

Before he knew it, Max was wheeling the space drive over to the ship, and he used robotic arms to install it. All of the proper hoses were hooked up, and everything tested well installed on the ship.

As he sat there at the lab table, staring at the code on his laptop on a Saturday afternoon, he received an email from the company CEO and executive team.

The email he was dreading.

It came at the exact wrong time. If the email had been received 24 hours earlier, midday on Friday, Max would have packed up his desk and gone home, trying to pick up the shattered pieces of his broken marriage and life from there. By Monday, Max would have shown the breakthrough to his bosses and colleagues, and the company would have seen a massive return on its investment in the project.

But at that moment, at 4PM on a Saturday afternoon, canceling the project and telling Max and his colleagues they were out of a job effective immediately was the exact wrong move.

Before he knew it, Max had deleted the code Lexi had created from the servers. The only copies were on the laptop and the foldable space drive itself. He picked up the laptop (and the cable, of course) and some spare clothes that he had left at the office, entered the ship, shut the door, and directed the robots to take the ship to the launch pad.

Perhaps it was an impulsive reaction to being fired.

Within 27 minutes of receiving the email, Max had left Earth's orbit.