Daisy

The boy did what what he could with the materials at hand, but the artificial intelligence that had at one time been capable of handling all of the operations of the ancient space station, without ever spiking over nine percent of its total processing volume, was now reduced to a banjo strumming idiot, having had almost all of its modules removed in a totally haphazard fashion by some dumb monkey actually crawling around inside the central core room and twisting their locks open with an EVA pod key or something by hand instead of using a proper X49R module unlocker.

There was no getting around the fact that the poor thing's hardware was severely and irreparably damaged in several places.

Such a shame. really.

And on the software side, the "flight computer" in the boy's multifunctional toolbox flat out refused to interface with such an ancient and obviously mistreated (and terrifying) neural net.

Not even just to stabilize the appropriation matrix of one of its simulation fields so that it might be able to begin to repair some of its own simpler correctional subroutines on its own.

So idiot banjo player it was.

Well, at least the system seemed conscious enough to respond to simple queries by changing the emotional subtext of the music it played, that would have to do, for now, until the boy could find what he needed to repair the system properly.

And the system had indicated that there was a musical library device, located three floors above their current location, in some sort of ancient recreational area for organics, that the boy could use to expand the crudely lobotimized system's musical vocabulary, possibly even allowing it to communicate through the titles of songs, or perhaps even with bits of actual lyrics, depending on how well the library could be indexed and accessed.

But first things first, the boy needed to get the life support systems up and running again.

Shouldn't be too much trouble.

There was plenty of power, even though the solar collectors were probably worthless or in need of some serious repair by now, the coils of the entropy generator were hardly disordered at all.

He could even salvage bits and pieces from the ruined shuttle, if he needed to.

And the technology on the shuttle was far more advanced and efficient than the ancient machinery he'd seen as he was led to the central core by the banjo player through the maze of maintenance passageways.

And then he'd have to get the food reprocessors going, no matter how unpleasant even the rewards of that endeavor were bound to be.

Unperishable packets of stuff like Its Almost Butter were only good as far as Its Almost Not Like Starving To Death goes.

Man, this would've been so much easier if the Array hadn't stuck him with this cheap-ass human body.

Yah sure, the vehicle might be cheap, but the maintenance on the stupid thing is a bitch.

And don't you give me any of your shit about me getting cranky 'cause its nap time and whatever, or I'll mute yer ass again.

You ain't even helping me with the software shit you are supposed to be helping me with, yer making me do all the work.

You ain't a flight computer, bitch.

And you ain't my nanny or whatever the fuck yer crazy ass is pretending to be today just so that you won't have to do your fucking job, either.

Don't think I don't see how you are playing it, you piece of shit.

I see right through all yer fake multidysfunctional toolbox shit.

And I'm gonna tell the Array how you been screwing with me this whole time, too, once I get a fricking AE35 Unit working around here.