Starship Engineer

Chapter 48 Who Is Julie?

I ran through my standard checks once we got into sub space. Everything was optimal! I set up my PerCom to alert me if there was any variance over 2% in the FTL system during the trip. Normally I would have set this to 5% but since we had passengers, I wanted to be extra cautious.

Eve found me and she was trailed by Luna and Zed. Luna was asking Eve question after question about her being a robot. Eve told me Luna didn’t believe that she was a bot. I raised my hand to give Eve a high five…something they did on that pirate vid…and we connected. That was my objective for Eve, make her indistinguishable from a normal person. Luna then asked me to prove it with emphasis.

I had Eve get on the table and opened her abdominal cavity to access her power core. I did a series of checks on Eve as she lay there talking normally to a gawking Luna. I found three very minor issues with Eve. One of the thermal regulators was operating at 43% and two of her ankle joints were showing micro stress fractures. Everything else looked to be at 92% or higher efficiency. Luna asked if Zed was also a bot and I said no! I told her to go find Gabby. Gabby was working on a pet project Luna may like and would be glad to see Zed.

Closing Eve up she reminded me of a list of things I had planned to do. I just took the first one she mentioned. I had planned to review Tora’s capacity as a propulsion engineer in emergency situations. I downloaded her results to a data slate and reviewed them. They were atrocious! I watched the replays of the simpler scenarios and immediately found her issue. She was inflexible in her thinking. Instead of getting the thrusters marginally functional and moving on to the next issue she tried to get the status to at least yellow before moving on. I decided to go find Tora and talk with her.

Tora was working on the main thrusters in aft engineering, directing bots to clean fuel feeds and exhaust projectors. I sat her down at a nearby station and asked her about her experiences in the VR simulations. She said they were frustrating and she had only succeeded twice in twenty-two attempts. I looked and didn’t even count those as successes…she survived but over half of the crew died. I spent the next hour going through a single scenario and told her my thought process on approaching each stage of the emergency. She seemed a little awed at a lot of my out of the box thinking. The best way to train her was going to be joining her in VR. I told Eve to set up a scenario twice a week with Tora for this purpose. Eve asked if she could join and Julie as well. As I was saying ok to this request I paused…Julie?

I went through my crew and then checked the passenger manifest…no Julie. Worried Eve might have bi-sected her personality, an early warning sign of a homicidal bot, I cautiously asked her who Julie was? Eve said Julie was the ship’s AI…or would be the ship’s AI. Apparently, she had named herself after the voice package I had set for her. I looked up the name associated with the voice I had selected…Julie Andrews. Casually I asked Eve how much did they communicate? Eve said, on average, one hundred and six times per day. I told Eve I was glad she was making friends.

As I was heading to my cabin for dinner and a long needed rest I was commed by Suruchi. She requested for me to have dinner with her and Dora in her dining room. Dining room? I brought up the ship’s schematics and found she had a small captain’s dining room with a viewport of space. It could only seat about eight people but it looked nice. There were a lot of rooms I had never seen on the ship so I was not too surprised. The captain’s dining room was on deck 7 though, accessed through the captain’s personal lift…damn maybe I choose the wrong cabin. I thought this might be a trap to get me to socialize with some of the passengers so I wouldn’t attend.

Eve brought out one of the meals I had purchased on Gunther Prime. Normally a steward bot would get my meal but Eve said they were all occupied. As I was halfway through my excellent food my door chimed. Eve got the door and Suruchi and Dora were there looking a bit angry. Oh shit! I had forgot to let them know I wouldn’t be attending.

They both let themselves into my cabin. Dora was obviously checking things out with her head on a swivel. Eve was watching her with a focused and calculated gaze and Suruchi had her burning eyes locked onto me. Suruchi had in fact had two wealthy passengers at dinner with their families. I reiterated I did not want to be associated with the running of the passenger liner. I hired her to take care of all of those headaches. Dora was done studying my room and told me I at least needed to be social. No! I didn’t! The argument wasn’t a yelling match. It was just a circular conversation that somehow, I lost. In the end I had agreed to attend two meals a week in the captain’s dining room…two meals of Suruchi’s choosing! At least I would get 48 hours notice, my only concession.

After they left I was seriously doubting my recent choices and future patience of dealing with a crew and passengers. Yes, it was partly because I had lost the recent argument so easily. I needed to vent. I asked Eve to set up a SLUMBER scenario where I could blow off some steam. Eve said my SLUMBER unit had been integrated into Julie’s network and I could select from tens of thousands of programs. She asked if Julie and herself could join me. Why the fuck not? Hopefully Eve and Julie wouldn’t be able to manipulate me as easily as the two women just had.

The game scenario was actually a VR game. It was a sword and sorcery game based on very old mechanics. Eve was explaining it me, you could actually gain experience and use that to level up skills, abilities, spells and other aspects of your avatar. I skimmed the tutorial quickly…who needs a tutorial for a kids game? I choose a half giant warrior who wielded a massive maul. Eve selected an elven sorceress. Eve’s elven appearance was much more comely than Sylvan space elves and she retained most of her features from the real world.

A black-haired human woman with short hair, short stature and well-muscled in heavy chain armor joined us. As she spoke I recognized the voice as the one I had selected for the ship’s AI. Julie had selected the paladin variant of the warrior class to be a healing support and assist in combat. She didn’t have nearly as evolved a program as Eve and acted very stiffly. I pointed a few of her mannerisms out early in our adventure to her to help her iron out those idiosyncrasies. I would have to talk with Emon about increasing the flexibility of her personality programming.

Our first adventure together was finding out what was poisoning the water in a small medieval town. We travelled up river and fought beasts and goblins during our search. In the end it was a hobgoblin shaman leading the tribe of goblins poisoning the town. They were doing it as revenge for the humans wiping out one of their settlements years ago. At least that is what the shaman said before I crushed his skull with my maul. It was very therapeutic. We had even managed to ‘level’ our avatars to level three. On waking I told Eve we should do that again sometime. Julie, the AI, had been reserved during the game but with Eve’s encouragement I thought she had started to open up more towards the end.

Exiting the VR I told Eve to schedule a meeting with Nero and Gabby today. I decided I would include both of them on the emergency scenarios with Tora…and yes Eve and Julie could join. Eve smirked a smile at that.

I went and found my two shuttle engineers. Stavros and Evira had organized the flight deck. Everything looked crisper and well organized. The luxury shuttle looked even more lavish than when I had purchased it. Evira said the seats were genuine bovine leather! They asked what they should do with the two heavy fighters. Shinade had been asking them to get one of them prepped in case we needed it…or more likely she wanted to do some joy riding. Maybe after she gave birth to our baby girl. They were both happy with their positions and their daughter was very happy as well. Their son had been mingling with the passengers and he seemed happy too.

They didn’t have much to do…just 3 shuttles for two experienced small craft engineers. I told them they could work on both the fighters…do as much maintenance as needed. We had plenty of parts and our fabricators should be able to cover anything we didn’t have.

I met with Gabby and Nero next. When I told them my plans for VR emergency drills they thought I should include Henry, Shinade, Andie and Emon as well. It would be a good bonding experience for the crew Nero said. Ugh, I reluctantly agreed and added Finn, Stavros and Evira as well. Might as well make it a complete party. The first scenario would be just before we exited sub space in the Arana system. Eve and I would program it.

Emon was my final stop of the day before going to work on the alien hull plating fabricators. We spent much longer than I would have liked talking about the AI and the VR integration. The passengers were utilizing the system heavily. Even with the expansion to capacity I had installed it regularly hit 62% capacity. This was a bit alarming and we would have to expand again if we were going to handle the load of up to 260 individuals…the max crew and passenger size projections of the Void Phoenix. In the end we decided to purchase a separate VR system for the ship and install it on deck 8, just below the ship’s AI housing. Julie could utilize it but it would come with a simple AI to monitor the system. A dedicated AI would be better able to manage the unit rather than have Julie monitor everyone’s time in the VR.

Emon had three tiers of VR hubs to choose from his favorite manufacturer. The basic model had less resolution and cost 20,000 Sol credits with a capacity of 300 people. That was ridiculously expensive until Emon went over the specifications required to handle that many people at once. My next option would be comparable to the VR experience currently offered by Julie. It would be around 30,000 Sol credits, maybe less since we already had the VR units. The high end option? That was 80,000 Sol credits and added more sensory feedback such as smell and realistic touch. That was a lot of credits! I told Emon I would think on it.

As we walked Eve tried to convince me to get the mid-tier option and get a smaller advanced system with just a half dozen logins for 12,000 Sol credits. That sounded the most palatable to me. It only took twenty minutes before Suruchi was comming me and asking for the high-end model upgrade. What the fuck Emon? Was Suruchi the parent you went to when you wanted something? I would have to talk to my engineering staff about sharing our discussions with the hospitality crew.