The entourage and their captain made their way from the cargo bay down a series of winding, unlabeled hallways dotted every twenty feet with massive doorways. Each door was easily ten feet tall by Sean's uneducated guess and would allow for three of himself shoulder to shoulder to pass through without touching the frame on either side. Who did those Grays steal this from was the only thought on Sean's mind as the troup continued their trek through the ever-winding hallway.
As they passed by a room, Sean could see one of the massive doors lying in their path, burnt and twisted from its recent explosion-fueled flight from its home in the wall. The automatons hovered over and past it without ever slowing their pace, but one paused and projected a blue light onto the rubble. A shape began to float above the broken door, a small blue triangle of opaque light slowly bobbed up and down like a buoy in water. As Sean watched the spectacle, he was slowly left behind by the group that was supposed to be guiding him. Sean looked to the group's quickly shrinking backs and decided to quicken his pace to join the others. With a light press against the floor, Sean bounded like a kangaroo, covering the distance in a single bound. As he landed, a thought crossed his mind that made him smile. That has got to be some kind of record.
After a few more twists, turns, and another meeting with the hall of fire suppressant, the crew and captain came to another set of uniform metal doors.
“This is the engineering room, captain. Let's head in and get you some proper attire,” came the newly reprised and assertive tone of the lead crewman. The doors slid open to reveal a wall of fire, blazing bright orange being held back by an opaque force field. Several shadows of flailing bots could be seen through the intense flames and wavering shielding. Sean couldn't quite make out what they were screaming, but he could make out the melting handprint against the shielding that appeared and began to slide down, leaving a trail of melted plastic. With a snap, the door rapidly slid closed, hiding the gruesome scene behind a veil of space-faring metal.
“Whoops,” the leader called out a few seconds after the door closed, “looks like we caught them early. Let's just give them a few more seconds, shall we?” Sean shifted his gaze from the door to his small companion, then back to the door. A pleasant tone rang from the door, signaling to whomever was on the opposite side that they were cleared for egress. The door slid open once again, revealing a rather large and severely damaged room. The room smelled of melted plastic and burnt metal, and a fine mist seemed to linger in the air from whatever was used to extinguish the flames from earlier. Sean entered slowly, feeling the wet sensation on his feet from the lingering suppressant on the almost tile-like flooring. Casting a wary glance around the room, Sean discovered the only undamaged item it held: a large table that seemed to be slightly concave along its surface and made of highly polished bare aluminum. The automatons quickly moved past their new captain and began examining the table, causing its concave surface to come to life with a lime green light. The leader motioned for Sean to follow them, and he began to cross the room, his feet clicking against the wet floor as he walked.
“This is a nano factory, captain,” the leader introduced the two to each other with a bit of an excited flourish. “It can fabricate any number of complex or simple objects, provided it has access to the raw materials and a good enough blueprint.” The other crewman began to float higher and pose around the nanofactory as if they were background actors demonstrating a product in an infomercial. A crewman placed its hands onto the edge of the table, causing its concave basin to fill with a green gelatin substance, which the crewman tapped with a single finger causing several small screens to pop up along its jiggly surface. The deft fingers moved on the screen and produced a small top hat in a blueprint on the small projected screen. With a slap, the crewman's hand hit the jelly of the nano forge and lifted quickly to reveal the two-dimensional blueprint of the top hat in midair inside the wire framework. With a wave of the automaton's hand, the top hat began to slowly materialize in midair inside the wire framework. Once it was fully completed, a small chime came from the table, and the top hat fell to its work surface. With a flourish and a spin, the floating robot picked up the hat and tossed it to another automaton. Then it produced a feathered boa using the same method made of pearlescent blue and pink feathers, which was taken by another automaton who draped it around its shoulders and floated suggestively around the table.
“Just bear in mind, it can only make things as wide as will fit on its surface and as tall as its build-space allows. Currently, this one has a maximum height of 24.67 inches, so you could definitely make some fun items with this baby.” The crewman at the table drew another shape on the screen, reminiscent of a grandfather clock. This time the slap and raise only produced a third of the grandfather clock starting from the bottom, the other half was cut off and glowing a pure light green, showing the maximum height had been reached. All three of the crewmen turned to Sean and shrugged, accepting the height limitations of the table. The artistic crewman flew up to Sean and scanned him with a red light, covering his body in a red grid all over and around every inch and curve of his body, then it hovered its way back over to the table and blinked its one large digital eye. The readings it had taken from Sean's body were displayed in the form of a small Sean Black hovering an inch from the table jelly, slowly rotating in a clockwise direction. Tapping the screen caused several different alien forms of bodily covering to appear on the small rendition of the captain of the Feather Fall, none of them looking remotely comfortable.
“So what'll it be, captain? On the house, of course.” The lead automaton asked, extending his hands in a flourish that beckoned him to try his hand at the rather advanced piece of technology. Sean made his way to the table and skimmed through some fashion options, each one more and more strange or uncomfortable looking. After a few more swipes, Sean decided on a simple outfit: boots with magnetic connection integrated in the soles, an almost jumpsuit made of an artificial fabric that felt close enough to cotton but had a metallic sheen, a set of undergarments made of the same material, and a crude rendition of his favorite mesh-backed sports cap. Although the cap lacked its trademarked alcohol brand mascot standing atop his barrel, it was a start at least and a welcome change from walking around naked while exploring his escape options.
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Once Sean and his robotic crew had finished adorning themselves in freshly created garb, the exploration of the ship began in earnest. Through holographic maps projected for him by his crew, Sean was able to discern which sections of the ship were in dire need of repair, what section of the ship they were in, and where the escape pods were, or would have been had a malfunction not caused them all to jettison from the ship unmanned and aimless. 'Well, that's one option gone,' Sean thought as he mulled over the map. According to the projection, there should be a kind of elevator or lift that would allow egress between the two levels of the ship. Sean and the crew, being in the lower level, were looking to try and make their way to the upper deck but found their passage impeded by another faulty part on this broken ship. The lift was there, there was no doubt about that, the problem was the lift was no longer a slow-moving disc that would float to raise and lower passengers as advertised by the crew. Now it was rapidly shifting between floors, slamming into the ceiling, and returning to the ground with a force that caused the floor to vibrate. The movement was rapid enough to cause a breeze in the hall that forced Sean to keep a hand on his new hat for fear of it flying off his head.
“Is there another way up?” Sean asked the crew leader in a half shout, trying to be heard over the rushing wind.
“Not at the moment,” the leader shouted back. His digital eye displayed a variety of colored squares for a brief moment before returning to its regular blue dot on a black background.
“The first mate says it should be fixed soon, though.”
“Okay,” Sean said, turning back to the ever-present hazard, trying to pull a solution from his limited career as a handyman. A realization seemed to break through the fog of contemplation as Sean asked the crew leader,
“Wait, the first mate? What first mate? I thought it was just you guys and me.” The lead crewmember shook its screen in disagreement.
“The first mate is what the ship's AI calls itself.” The lead crewman shouted over the wind, raising his voice, “I think something in the AI may have been damaged, it's never called itself anything before the attack or had a gender.”
“What?” Sean called out, practically screaming. A sudden feeling of impending danger flooded Sean’s senses. He turned to face the rising and falling lift and realized that the impact speed in both directions had been increasing incrementally while he had been talking with the lead crewman. Quickly Sean grabbed the closest crewman and began to beat a hasty retreat from the area. There was a loud grinding sound, and the lift slammed into the landing pad hard enough to crack the alien material and deaden the pink light that controlled its buoyancy. The platform shot upwards with alarming speed and struck the upper landing with the same force, and then it began to turn as it fell. While the force of the impacts had been significant inside the gravity field, the platform itself seemed to barely have any real substantial weight as it slowly fell to the ground below like a kite drifting on weak air currents. Sean and his crew stuck their collective heads from around a doorframe to watch the platform gently drift down to its final location propped up against the right wall.
“Huh,” Sean said in response to the scene that played out before him.
“Captain?” The lead crewman asked, turning his digital eye to look up at Sean. “Is something wrong?”
“I dunno,” Sean said as he stepped out into the hallway, observing the platform from a healthy distance. “I just, kinda…You know.”
“No, I don’t,” The lead crewman said as he followed Sean out into the hall, shifting his gaze back and forth between Sean and the broken lift. Sean released the crewman he had snatched up during his brave tactical retreat onto the ground and placed his hands on his hips.
“Well it’s just, with all that speed and power, all the slamming and craziness. I kinda was, you know, expecting more…”
“You thought it would blow up?” Asked the lead crewman. Sean clapped his hands together and pointed at the crewman.
“Yes,” Sean replied with a smile.
“And you are disappointed that it didn’t?” Sean held one of his hands out and tilted it from side to side.
“Kinda? Is that weird?”
“Yes,” the lead crewman responded as the crew around him shook their heads in positive affirmation. Trying to ignore the comment, Sean moved to the incredibly light lift pad and gave it an exploratory finger poke while shielding his face with his other hand. The lift made no more effort to do anything other than rest against the wall. With no explosion imminent, Sean began examining the large saucer in earnest.
Made of a yet unknown to Sean material, the lift had a gnarled and pitted surface that reminded him of the styrofoam coolers and packing material back on Earth. Unlike styrofoam, while the surface appeared pitted and made of small compressed orbs, it would go completely smooth anywhere his hand touched, and Sean could not bend it when he applied the kind of pressure he thought would snap a piece of it off. Using crude mental math, Sean began weighing his options for creating a path to the upper deck. He could potentially use the platform as it seemed strong enough to support him, but not knowing the load-bearing potential of the platform made him nervous. He asked one of the crewmen to create the holographic map again and tried combing through it to locate anything resembling stairs, an exercise that proved both time-consuming and fruitless. As Sean was about to give up and resign himself to his new pastime of waiting on ship repair, he noticed the buckle on one of his boots had worked itself loose during the retreat and was firmly holding itself in place on the floor. He made his way to the failed escape artist and then examined his other boot, wondering why he hadn’t noticed the other had come off. They felt like a solid pair of work boots he had at home in regards to their weight, so maybe the loops had failed during their rushed production? That didn’t sound right to him as he retrieved the boot from the metal grating.
“Hey,” Sean asked the crewman that recommended the boots, “Are these still working?” Sean gave the boot over for inspection, and the crewman held it for only a second before the strong magnetic pull from the boot yanked the boot to the floor, wrenching both of its thin arm-like appendages away from the unseen force holding it at a perfect distance from its body. The crewman looked from the boot to Sean, and one of the trapped arms gave the equivalent of a thumbs-up.
Curious, Sean removed his other boot and gave a light push off of the ground with his feet, causing him to rise higher than he ever could have jumped from a relaxed vertical attempt on Earth. Sean collected his boots and walked over to the lift and gave another half-hearted attempt to guess the full height of the lift tube before muttering, “Fuck it,” under his breath and attempting a full-fledged jump.