“You’re drifting to the side, Sam, veer a little left,” Doppel instructed.
I gave a mental command to the engines, gimbaling the main fusion-powered thruster by the measly five degrees that the system could manage. This million-ton brick wasn’t built to be maneuverable, I groused internally. In space, it had a five hundred kilometers turning radius, and in the atmosphere, the performance was even worse. The superheated plasma exhaust created a buffer zone of turbulent air that shook the entire vessel and robbed it of any aerodynamics it might have otherwise possessed. That and I could feel the outer hull blistering, which was a physical pain the system felt I should experience.
“Um, ok, now you’re tilting backward. Sam, we’re not going to land in one piece if we land on our back.”
“I’m losing it!”
“Aim for the water! Some of the crew might survive that!” Doppel urged me.
I tried, but instead, as the ship flipped over and started to tumble wildly, the front half hit the island’s single mountain and snapped clean off. It felt a bit like being decapitated. Helpless now, I watched the rest of the ship scatter across the landscape, exploding into fireballs of various sizes, including a particularly energetic one where the ship’s two fusion reactors hit the ground at a few hundred kilometers per hour.
Everything faded to black.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Doppel said into the silence. “I mean, it’s only your fifth try.”
“Not so bad? That was the worst crash yet. Didn’t just kill everyone on board, I probably killed a few million natives too.”
“Nah, we picked a spot that’s far from any cities. They’d have been fine. Hell of a fireworks display, but the fallout from a fusion reactor explosion isn’t nearly as bad as a fission reactor. Tritium only has a half-life of 12.3 years. People will be able to use that spot in a few decades, no problem.” Doppel said with a grin.
“Hah, hah, funny,” I muttered angrily.
“Come on, Sam, relax, you’ve got as long as you need to practice this. What’re a few more simulated crashes?”
“Can we at least turn off my pain receptors? Why do I have to feel what it’s like to have my hull melt off?” I asked.
“We could, I mean, I disabled all the pain you’d have felt from the burnt electronics. But, the whole point of the feedback is to help you get used to feeling as if the ship is your body. It is your body. Your real body. You need to fly as if you were flying your own body, not just sending mental commands. Picture yourself as the bird. Be the bird.” Doppel said in her best sensei imitation.
“More like a falling whale,” I muttered with a sigh. “Couldn't you do it instead?”
“Sam, remember, I’m only as good as you are. I’d crash too. The only way to make your copies better at a particular task is to improve at it yourself. There’s a reason a good Shipbrain should focus their time on self-improvement.” Doppel explained.
“Come on, the ship has to have an autopilot function.” I protested.
“Strangely no, it’s almost like no one planned to land this thing on a wheelworld in another dimension. Or at all, actually. This ship wasn’t meant to land. It has the thrust to do so, but thrust isn’t really the problem.” Doppel explained.
“There’s no freaking way we can safely land this. I mean, I might get lucky, and do it once, but do it reliably? We’re not maneuverable enough.” I opined.
“Honestly, I kind of agree with you. How could I not? We’re almost the same person. I’m just trying to stay optimistic. Sam, if you think it can’t be done, I’m going to be thinking the same thing.” Doppel admitted, sounding disheartened.
I thought about it for a while Doppel waited for my next instruction. I was getting used to how Doppel operated. For all of her sapience, she couldn’t be any more creative than I myself was. She was built to follow my lead, not come up with ideas. She was a sounding board for me to brainstorm my own ideas, not a source of inspiration unless it pertained to things related to the tutorial program she was still running. I’d long since decided that I didn’t want Doppel to go away, so I’d just refused to end the tutorial.
“Well, can we fix that?” I asked.
“Oh, I see what you’re thinking, that could work,” Doppel said with renewed enthusiasm. “It won’t be as easy as you think it will be. The repair bots aren’t going to be able to EVA given the limits of your tech field, so we’ll need to send humans out there, but it’s doable.”
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“You want to bolt four of our shuttles to the outside of the ship?” Captain Tanleir asked, sometime later when I presented my idea. I was currently a hologram being projected onto the bridge, standing next to the captain’s chair. Now that we’d done another few days' worths of repairs with the bots' help, I had a few more toys to play around with. It was better than having to wear the action figure android.
“Preferably a fair distance away from the central axis, so their engines can help with maneuvering. Thrust-wise, they won’t be much help, but if their engines are far enough away, they can help me rotate this thing. We could attach them to some new landing legs, kill two birds with one refit.” We were planning to land vertically, as the whole ship was already oriented like a skyscraper with the engine at the bottom. Since the ship’s structure could handle almost two gee’s of thrust, it would support its own weight upright if we landed it that way. No need to turn our walls into floors.
“Well, under most circumstances, I’d say “no way!”, given how expensive those shuttles are to replace. But they’re pretty useless given the limits of your tech field...” I frowned slightly, thinking that I was getting tired of hearing about those limits, but the captain continued without noticing my expression, “So, I say, ”sure, why not?”. Heck, if it improves our odds of survival take eight of them,” the captain offered.
I created a hologram display of my proposed additions to the ship. The captain examined it carefully, “You sure your tech field will expand to cover them if you put them that far out?” he asked.
“I hope so,” I admitted. “Margaret has been driving me nuts testing how my field works. So far as we can tell, she can attach probes to the end of really long metal sticks and they will work, so long as they are physically connected to the ship. But they don’t work if they’re only connected by a string or wire. My field stretches to cover anything my head can see as being permanently attached to “me”, the ship, which somehow means a rigid connection? I have no idea why that’s how it works.” I admitted. I had had zero success in controlling my ability in any way so far, despite the various mental meditation techniques Margaret had insisted I try.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“By attaching the shuttles to rigid landing legs, it should be fine. But, we probably only have enough material to run control circuits to four of them. Most of our stores of replacement wiring have already been used up by all the repairs.” I pointed out with a sigh.
“Can’t we make more?” the captain asked. “We have an Ulderani minfab unit, it’s basically an auto factory for spare parts.”
“Sure, but where are we going to get the copper? Unless you want to scrap something for the wiring...”
“Hmm. We could trade with the natives for some copper. Take a shuttle down with some glass beads and see what you can buy.”
“That’s kind of racist, I think. And, I’m not sure the Native American comparison is apt, considering they’re the ones that originally built the wheelworld, and their cousins or whatever in our dimension are more advanced than we are.” I said disapprovingly.
“That’s assuming Margaret is right and those are in fact Ulderani down there,” the captain countered.
“If they’re not, how are we going to be able to talk to them? We’re actually hoping the language they speak is close enough to the Ulderani I learned in school so we can understand each other.”
The captain rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He appeared to be growing a goatee. “Yeah whatever,” he said finally. “Use four shuttles, get Jim to go over your blueprints, and offer suggestions. We’ll hold off talking to the natives until we land on that island and they come talk to us.”
After considerable deliberation, we had already agreed that the best landing site was on a large island in the middle of an enormous lake. It was basically the size of all five great lakes combined, more like a freshwater ocean than a lake, really. The island had enough flat land for farmland to feed fifty thousand people or more, and the lake probably had fish. And the most important thing, it was in a strangely unpopulated zone of the wheelworld, with the nearest towns several hundred kilometers away. We’d not been able to determine the reason for that, but we couldn’t detect anything hazardous. It was our best bet for a place that the natives might not object to us claiming.
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“It looks good to me,” Jim said with a shrug. “Where are we getting the materials for those landing legs though?”
“I’m thinking we could build them using the prefab houses. They’re meant to fit together in a certain pattern, but you can change the pattern and turn them into different shapes. They’re basically legos, and we have thousands of things...”
“Ah, the colonists are going to love that!” Jim said with a laugh.
“They’ll love not dying in their cryotubes when this ship doesn't turn into a massive crater.” I pointed out.
“The material is designed to be as lightweight as possible. They’re flimsy aluminum and plastic. The weight you’re planning to put on these things… they’ll definitely crumple. Even if you use hundreds of them stacked together like that.”
“They only need to work once, on the descent to hold the shuttles in place. Then they’ll help keep the ship stable long enough for it to settle. The main weight of the whole ship will be on the engine nozzle anyways.” I argued.
“The nozzle is rated to handle a lot of thrust, which means it’ll take the strain. But I don’t know if the gimbaling will hold. Unless you land it on perfectly flat ground, it could twist to one side, then one of those landing legs will be handling way more weight than they’ll be able to take.” Jim said.
“That’s still going to be a concern even without the landing legs. The gimbaling tops out at five degrees, Jim. I’ve got to believe that those legs can survive that much tilt without snapping.”
“Did you model it?”
“Yeah.”
“What did the models say?”
“We’ll fall over if the ground is too soft or not flat enough, but we already knew that. The legs buy us about two extra degrees of tilt before we tip over.”
Jim was silent for a while. “I honestly can’t think of anything better, except maybe we can use parts of those shuttles for extra support. Strip them down to the engines, use everything else to reinforce the legs. Your blueprints look like you think we can recover those shuttles afterward. That’s not going to happen, so might as well make the most of them.”
I nodded and together we started to work on improving my design using the shuttle parts.
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“Fifty-two simulator runs with the new legs,” I said with a sigh. “Not counting those first two failures, what was my success rate?”
“88%,” Doppel told me with a shrug. “But you’re exhausted, and it’s time for you to call it quits. It’s been a long week since you became Shipbrain, and you’ve been pushing yourself pretty hard, Sam. Time for your six hours of downtime.”
“Yes mom,” I told her with a groan.
“Hey! I resent that. I’m far too young and pretty to be your mom. I’m only a week old!” Doppel said with a grin. “Blame the tutorial program, it’s forcing me to nag you. Tomorrow is the day we’re doing it for real though, you should get a good night's sleep.” She told me seriously.
“Am I really ready for this? I never signed up to be a pilot, why does this sort of thing fall under the Shipbrain’s purview anyway?”
“Want to know something wild?” Doppel asked me.
“Yeah?”
“Ulderani warships are operated only by a trio of Shipbrains, each working 9-hour shifts. No crew, just Shipbrains, bots, and no need for life support beyond a few tubes. It lets them handle something like twenty gees of thrust 'cause they got special brain jars with modified inertial-dampening stasis fields rather than the gel you’re floating in.”
“Seriously?”
“The Ulderani treat their Shipbrains like rockstars. People actually know their names, like people still tell stories about the “Red Baron” two hundred years after his death. They've got Shipbrain ace pilots with hundreds of confirmed kills to brag about.”
“I’ve never seen them mentioned in any of the entertainment programs I’ve watched.” I objected.
“That’s because they respect them too much to include them in their kids' shows,” Doppel replied. “This is straight from the tutorial program, I’ve got stories in my head of exemplary Shipbrains I could share with you if I thought that it would help.”
“Hah, well… what’s your point?” I asked.
“Have a little pride, Sam. You’re doing great at a job that really matters. Isn’t that what you always wanted? Now take a well-earned rest, and you’ll nail this landing tomorrow, no sweat.” Doppel told me.
“Alright,” I said with a sigh, “and thanks, I appreciate the pep talk.”
“No problem. What else am I here for?” She asked, sounding almost wistful. But I was already drifting off to sleep and didn’t reply.