How did I figure it out? Not so hard, she hadn't given me a direct answer earlier when I asked her where she had gone, and better yet, she's told me little to nothing about her abilities. I hadn't asked, but it's a little funny that I have to if I want her to tell me. It's implied.
I wipe off the dust from the glass panels. I'm careful, I only let my hands graze over the glass. No need to further screw up things. I then dust off my hands to the side, turning my head away.
When the cloud of dust dissipates, I continue studying the fabricator.
Around twenty minutes later, I hear footsteps. I turn around.
The students hold batteries in their hands, all crystalline and glowing. I see the guy I'd called before at the lead. They look hesitant at what to do with the batteries.
"Drop them in this chute," I say, patting the metal surface. A loud 'Thung' sound reverberates through the room. I wince slightly.
The guy I'd called, he walks to the chute first, and the drops the battery in. The rest take his lead, though a few are lazy enough to simply drop their batteries into the hands of a few.
I turn to the glass panels expectantly. For a few tense minutes, nothing happens. Most students leave by then. A few still hang around, curious and expecting. Then a symbol appears on the panel.
A tinge of joy shoots through me. I ignore it and tap the symbol. The mini-fab comes to life, an assortment of symbols appearing on the screen. A few mini lights on the mini-fab glow blue.
I crack my knuckles and grin.
I tap a small box icon, and it fades, replaced by a progress bar at twenty-three percent. I tap the progress bar, and it fades to show me a bunch of numbers in different hues. The value I'm searching for is turquoise, that is, how many kilograms of molecular scramble I have available. Currently, I have around sixty-nine kilograms for use.
Which is... almost how much I'd like there to be. Seventy-five kilograms is what I'm confident to work with, eighty is guaranteed success.
But I can still work with it. A little tricky, yes, but I can do.
I pull up the old settings, get used to some of the options, change a couple of things, and then I'm all ready.
I take a deep breath and focus myself. I use my neural implant to search for all the required data, optimize the quantity, and organize them into little packets. I then connect them to little icons on my visual interface for easy access.
I then sink my mind into the job.
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A couple hours later, I'm done. And very, very tired. I unsteadily walk away from the fabricator and wipe the sweat off my brow with my sleeve. My chest, armpits, and back feel damp.
I slowly drop to a sitting position and then slump onto the floor. My breathing is haggard, my vision a little blurry. Side effects of mental exhaustion. Well, mental exhaustion with a neural implant.
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It feels like my thoughts are coming to me slowly. It's off-putting, somewhat. I ignore that and focus on staying awake. My eyelids are droopy, and it's very tempting to give in and close them. But I'm slightly afraid that somebody might take it upon themselves to try to fix the engine and screw up disastrously.
It's only a slight possibility, but from experience, I know what letting that slight possibility go unhindered can do. I've been bitten in the ass more than once, despite the odds.
But... it was kind of a small possibility, wasn't it? Besides... maybe I could sleep anyways if I sent out a ping to keep people from touching the components.
Do not touch the components.
I send it to anyone within the ship.
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When I awake I feel a lot better. It takes me a little bit of blinking to realize where I am, which is the crew quarters. I'm on a soft bed, a white blanket on top of me. For five minutes I just stay there, letting my mind catch up, and at the same time indulging myself.
I turn my head and see Grace staring at me with a small smile on her face.
"Did... did you watch me sleep?" I ask.
She opens her mouth, and closes it, and then opens it again.
"No! I mean—uh, yeah but..." She says.
"But?" I ask, raising an eyebrow.
"It's," She clears her throat. "Nothing."
"Uhuh," I say, with what I imagine to be a dry expression on my face.
"So, anyway, they've returned. And—"
"Wait, did anyone touch the components?" I say.
"Nobody touched your precious components. To continue," She says, a little pointedly, "The worms did nothing but circle around them. Well, they're still circling them, ergo, us, so there's that."
It takes a moment for that to sink in. When it does, I jump up.
"What?" I yell at her.
She recoils.
"They've... been circling around us for... three hours?"
I take in a deep breath and pinch my nose bridge.
"Okay, I'm guessing this is a psychological tactic. That is, they're trying to scare us. I'm lacking a lot of information..." I stare at her pointedly. She shrugs and looks away. "As to the why. So, they remain to be a very big threat. We could contact the school, considering that this wasn't part of the excursion, and ask them to pick us back up, but I'm considering leaving that for emergencies. I'm not going to give up just yet." I say.
She nods.
A thought pops into my mind. I frown.
"How helpful have you been?" I ask.
"What?" She asks, her tone a bit more sharper than I'm used to.
It catches me off guard a little.
"How... helpful have you been, for an A.I with your processing power?"
She doesn't answer. Or at least, not until I've jumped off the bed and started to walk to the door.
"Little." She says.
I turn around, raising an eyebrow.
"And?"
Her expression gives nothing away. I sigh, turning around. I start walking, and I sense her following after me.
A simple scan tells me where to go, and how to go there. The path highlighted in my mind. As I walk there, I do note the extra faces around. I make some changes to my body language, to appear as an authoritative figure. It doesn't exactly make much difference, but I know that some students are probably evaluating me, or re-evaluating me, so in future scenarios having posed myself as an authoritative figure might give my words more weight.
When I reach the mini-fabricator, Grace speaks up again.
"They're broken," she says.
I was expecting a lot of things, but not that. My eyes widen in horror. I pick up the individual pieces from the shute and stare at them. Each of them has a small layer of blue crystal covering them. And that tells me exactly how I'd messed up, I'd made the second last step the last step.
"Fuck! Oh fuck this stupid fabricator, fuck this excursion, and fuc—not fuck you, since that's weird, but fuck it all!" I yell in plain annoyance, clenching my fists and waving them at the ceiling.
And immediately after, I feel like a fucking idiot. Because a lot of students were standing at the hatch, some not even bothering to contain their amusement.
I sigh and slowly facepalm.
Fuck me.