It had been around three days since Houston found himself becoming a robot on what seemed to be a scrapyard planet.
"This looks good." Houston grabbed a metal piece off the ground and set it on his self-made wagon, built from a few scavenged metals and scraps. "It's almost full now. One more haul like this should give me enough to start working on the drone."
"That one there looks good." Houston pointed to a big piece of metal, roughly the size of a car door. He walked over and examined it. "Looks like this can be broken down into ceramic steel." He said with a smile, hauling it over and tossing it onto the now-full wagon.
"Alright, it's full now. Let's get back to base." Houston said with a smile. Recently he'd noticed a lot of his emotions had become somewhat dampened — which was quite eerie. "Guess that's a downside of becoming a robot, huh. Well, one good thing about it — I never get bored." He mused, dragging the wagon as he started back toward the crash site he now called his base.
"Just one more haul now. Can't wait to build that drone." Houston said with a spark of excitement, walking back toward base. "Guess I went pretty far out, huh. Probably gonna take a twenty-minute walk to get back." He calculated, eyeing the crash site off in the distance, now quite far.
After roughly twenty minutes of walking, he arrived back at base and stopped the wagon just outside it, then began carrying the scraps over one by one, feeding them into the T1 Printer. "Alright, time to get some more metal." Houston said with a satisfied smile as he fed them in one after another, the machine steadily outputting ceramic steel and other basic materials.
A few minutes later, the wagon was empty, the last of the scrap converted into raw material. "To the side you go." Houston mused, moving the finished materials over to where he kept the rest of his stockpile.
"Alright — time to get more scraps to feed this hungry boy." Houston said, heading back out, dragging the wagon off into the distance.
As he walked, his mind wandered back to the day before. After finishing his first batch of tools, he'd spent the rest of that evening reading through the remaining books in the safe — and what had intrigued him most was learning how space travel actually worked.
The main way ships travel system to system is by using hyperlanes, he recalled — a genuinely interesting concept, described in the book as a kind of highway built into the fabric of space itself. Think of hyperlanes as the universe's built-in FTL highways. Normally, ships can't go faster than light — they're limited to sublight speed. But entering a hyperlane lets a ship exceed that. The catch is, it's a fixed route. If there's no hyperlane connecting one system to another — even if the two are right next to each other — that method simply isn't an option, because the hyperlane doesn't exist there. You could still make the trip the slow way, but it could take decades, so unless you're truly out of options, nobody bothers.
Then there's hyperdrives — the tech that lets a ship actually find and enter a hyperlane. They need time to charge before a jump; low-tier hyperdrives can take up to months, while the most advanced ones can cut that down to a week or two.
Once a ship's actually inside a hyperlane, though, the trip itself is nearly instantaneous.
Beyond hyperlanes, there are other FTL methods too — hyper relays, for one. If hyperlanes are highways, hyper relays are more like bullet trains built right on top of them. Normally, entering a hyperlane means traveling to the edge of a system first, to get clear of gravitational distortion, since that's usually where the entrance sits. Hyper relays change that — they let a ship enter and exit from through the built hyper relay instead of going to the edge of the sytem, cutting down both the hyperdrive's charge time and the need to travel to the edge at all. The catch is that relays are essentially useless unless there's a whole network of them built on top of an already-connected hyperlane network.
There are also warp drives, technically — though they're barely an option at all. Wildly unstable, with a real chance of tearing a ship apart, or dropping it somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
And then, the last method — one that doesn't exist anymore. Gateways. Gates that stayed connected to each other no matter the distance, even from one end of the galaxy to the other. According to the book, though, they simply don't exist anymore.
"Guess I trailed off a bit there, huh." Houston thought, snapping back to the present. He'd wandered pretty far from base by now, and started gathering scrap again, loading it into the wagon.
As he collected scrap, he spotted what looked like a dead robot, a gun built where its right hand should have been. "This guy looks good to salvage and dismantle." He mused, walking closer — and then it jolted awake, raising the weapon at him, clumsy but fast.
"Unknown threat spotted. Initiating fighting protocol." A mechanical voice rasped out as it leveled the gun at him. Houston dodged just as it fired.
"You little shit — take this." He tackled it to the ground, wrestling it down, then grabbed a jagged piece of metal off the dirt and drove it straight into its chest, where the power core usually sat on these things.
*Crackle. Crackle.*
The robot shuddered, sparks spitting from the wound, before finally going still. "Phew. I really should get myself a weapon. Don't even know if this body can take a gunshot." Houston muttered, dragging the now-dead machine over and tossing it onto the wagon, which was now half full.
"Next thing after the drone — definitely building myself a gun." Houston said, getting back to work, hauling more scrap toward the wagon.
"What's after that? I don't know. Maybe find a way to leave this place." He muttered, glancing up at the sky as he worked.
"Wonder if I'll ever be able to build myself a spaceship." Houston said, tossing the last scrap onto the wagon before heading off toward another scrap dune in the distance.
"Well — future's a problem for future-me. Let's just worry about right now." He hummed, picking up his pace, heading out toward the horizon with something like excitement.