There was a moment of disjointed time and then… I was in my new mobility platform. The sensors were weaker than before, but they were mine. Comm links, powersource, thrusters, actuators… I was finally here in the real world!

Mommy had eased up on her restrictions as I’d proved myself able to handle more and more of the usual suite of Jovian senses, but having to go through her systems rather than my own felt off somehow, like I was operating everything wearing gloves and eye protectors.

I activated the antigrav in my new home and rose off the engineering cradle, my roughly hexagonal outer plate wobbling a little bit as I tested the thrusters, the small actuator tentacles emerging from the sides of the disk flexing with their own brownian motion as idle thoughts of gripping things and turning screws and even walking like some kind of strange octopus flitted through my head.

This was… fun! I was free! Well, mostly. I lowered myself first back to a console, hopped down to the carpet and then scampered up the wall employing the odd form of nano-gecko-foot grippy surfaces I had on my tentacular feety-army-legs until I was on the ceiling, out of reach, and just had a look around.

“How do you feel, Chance?” asked Lieutenant Junior-grade Errol Kim, a Zeosian. She ran a tricorder over my body and punched at the controls on the handset a little, nodding in a very human-like way. “You look to be in good shape.”

I ‘looked’ down at her, seeing through her body, her heart, her skeletal system, her bare feet which were, for humanoids, rather outsized and webbed. I thought they were fascinating, but kept that to myself. I knew she was sensitive about them; she hadn’t gotten anything but curiosity and understanding — at least from anybody onboard this ship — from the rest of the crew, but I didn’t need to add to that. Not today at least.

“Thank you, Ms Kim, I feel fine! Mommy, look, I can walk on the ceiling!”

“If you fall off and break something, don’t come hovering to me,” Buran answered, not even deigning to manifest a holographic avatar. I knew she cared, I could feel her internal sensors all over me. It felt nice.

“I won’t, I’ll come back to Ms Kim!”

I could see the heat generated by everyone, little mobile chemical furnaces heating up the engineering deck as they all walked around being humanoid. I could perceive the slight changes in blood pressure and heart rate as fingers touched or glances were stolen. I could see the electromagnetic fields of all the equipment being worn, carried or stuffed into the walls. I turned and looked at the Pulsed Singularity Drive, and it was a riot of emissions and fields. It was a beautifully chaotic dance of tightly controlled physics. I couldn’t really see gravity, not well, and subspace was right out of the question, at least until I got a proper body.

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I could also tell what people had had for lunch, and busied myself trying to untangle what was in their stomachs and matching it with which cafeteria they must have gone to.

“Well, Miss Chance, if that’s all for today, I think I need to write up the report of your successful integration with your mobility platform and get back to work with that phase inverter.”

“Thanks again!” I said, then detached from the ceiling, flipped over, not that I needed to, and went off for a bit of a wander.

The USS Buran was quite different to most other Challenger class ships, even the ones that were still in service. Most hadn’t been retrofit with a Pulsed Singularity Drive for starters, which ate up a good deal more of the engineering section than even one of the really old and clunky warp cores for example in the ancient Constellation class, though I noticed that those new funky bio-neural gel packs were nowhere to be found. We did have a whole extra set of holodecks, and of course holo-emitters everywhere… and one of our cargo decks had been converted into an aquatic habitat. Cetaceans! From Earth! Distantly at least. Poor Earth.

Ooh, an open Jeffries Tube! Adventure awaits! I floated up the smallish tube until I found a heat source. “Hello! Wotcha doin’?”

BANG!

“Ow!” a male voice said. Blix Zoz, Human. “That fuu-uuudging hurt,” he said, crawling out from the enclosed space, eyes widening when he saw me. “What’re you… you’re that new robot, the small one.” He rubbed his head, his fingers came away bloody. “Sh-oot, I’ve cut myself.”

“Stay still, let me stop the bleeding,” I said, hovering closer. He put his hand on the wound.

“No, no thank you, I’ll just head to sickbay. Let me just get my tools from inside the… I was kinda busy realigning the inertial dampener Tokvelt relays and…” Blix stuck his head back inside the open hatch he’d crawled out of, the rest of what he was babbling on about being muffled.

“Chance!”

BANG!

“Shhh-ugar honey ice tea…”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing, Mommy, I’m helping Blix realign the inertial dampener’s Tokvelt relays. But somebody made him hit his head and now he has to go to the nurse’s station.”

Blix grunted and groaned, and eventually reappeared, blood dripping down his face and neck, holding a toolbox. “Don’t trouble yourselves, either of you. Miss Chance, Miss Buran.”

I noticed he looked up when he said Mommy’s name. He shuffled himself painfully down the Jeffries tube, grumbling something under his breath and holding a rag that I hoped was clean enough to his head, inspecting it every so often. I watched him until he exited the tube, then debated putting the cover back on the hatch, but settled for making a note in the ship’s maintenance log that it was still open due to a minor injury, and floated down the tube to see what else I could find today.