Chapter Text
It had to be done mechanically, as it turned out. Whatever Hope was, it was certainly powerful enough to fling a starship around, but it was downright incompatible with the standard-issue helmscolumn that normally routed the power from the helmsman to all the ship’s systems. In fact, the damned thing had seemed physically repulsed when they’d tried to hook Eridan up to it, recoiling from his flesh as far as its sessile nature would allow. So, in the end, they rigged up a second room a floor below, with just a simple converter to draw power, a conduit to carry it off, and limited computer access. You could get at the navigational system from there, and most of the onboard entertainment, but not much else.
Sollux wasn’t an idiot, though. All things considered, he was the logical backup system should the jerry-rigged one fail at any point. He helped with the initial planning and then the construction, being nearly as familiar as Equius was with that particular circuit, one that probably every wriggler had played with at some point: You hooked a battery to a light bulb, then unhooked the battery, switched out a few components, and tried to see if you could get the bulb to light up just by touching the contacts, a game he’d won every time. He made sure Eridan had a comfortable seat – a sort of waist-height recliner, so he could sit or stand or lean back as he pleased. He checked that the room had adequate lighting, ventilation, temperature controls, and so forth. Just because it was in the ship’s “basement” didn’t mean it had to feel like it. When everything was ready, Sollux also oversaw the installation of Feferi’s new helmsman: a pair of wrist tethers connecting him by pencil-thick flexible wires to the power converter and conduit. No tight fetters, no hanging by his arms, just simple skin-contact straps similar to what Sollux had worn while building the circuits to discharge static electricity safely. He could still move around; there was enough slack for a nearly full range of motion. And then…they left him.
For a while, it was mostly just fun, zipping around the local galaxy, shooting off probes at anything that looked interesting – a “shakedown cruise,” Feferi had called it. It was even kind of interesting, seeing that the nearest stars and planets came in such a wide variety. Sollux amused himself by running the incoming data through different filters, rendering pretty pictures out of random gas and dust. Eventually, though, the novelty began to wear off, and Sollux had to take an honest look at his own situation: He was bored.
He didn’t have a job, was the thing. Feferi had assigned him the title of “Prince Consort,” which had lasted all of about two nights until he’d gone in and changed it. But he hadn’t had anything to change it to, and so now his title was just blank. TBD. It mocked him every time he checked his profile.
Other people had jobs, and job titles. Several, even! Equius was currently listed as a medichanic, since they hadn’t got anyone else to fill either role quite as well – Feferi couldn’t spend all her time healing people, and Sollux wasn’t nearly as skilled at construction. Karkat had started out as something military, rotated into more of an advisor role, and lately had just been taking every kitchen shift he could get, claiming it was less stressful. From the volume of yelling coming from the kitchen on a regular basis, Sollux figured it was more like he actually enjoyed having a certain amount of stress, but he’d rather be stressed about things that weren’t threatening people’s lives, only their satiety.
Sollux could still do tech stuff for people, and tried not to look like he was jumping at the chance every time something came up; it was just that there wasn’t a lot of need for it. The onboard computer system ran as smoothly as only generations of previous long-suffering technicians working with generations of idiot crews could account for, with all necessary functions as obvious and well-documented as possible. It had an automated help function that actually worked, for crying out loud. The only time anyone needed his help was the first time they were trying to do something new, and sometimes not even then.
He missed his bees. They wouldn’t be happy onboard, though, and he’d seen enough panic-stricken people flailing wildly at bugs planetside to think twice about introducing them to a sealed environment full of delicate machinery. Besides, the garden section of the ship had perfectly normal pollinators, with zero chance of psychoactive contamination in their products.
Sollux spent a little time indulging in the indolence his unique position allowed, but after a few nights of nothing but movies, video games, and snack binges, he woke up in a bitter self-loathing funk that even two showers could barely shake off. He took to wandering the ship, looking for anywhere he could make himself useful, ignoring Aradia’s comments that he was too alive for a proper haunting. Everyone was friendly, and glad to see him; everything they were doing ran perfectly well without him. The second time he caught himself pausing outside the room with the helmscolumn in it, staring meaningfully at the door, he said fuck this and went to start a deep scan of all the computer systems on board. There must be something he could fix, or at least optimize.
Hours later, Sollux stared at the scan results. The navigation system had holes in it.
No, not holes. That implied a lack of something, that something was missing or had been removed and not replaced. What the nav computer’s memory had was patches of nonsense data, as if whatever was supposed to be there had been replaced by a piece from somewhere else entirely. Methodically, he went through and tagged them all, creating a secondary document with a list of known errors.
He could restore the thing from the backup – but the last backup had been a while ago, and it looked like the automatic updates of that backup had stopped running for some possibly-related reason. And if the junk data patches had, in fact, just been drag-and-dropped accidentally from somewhere else, it might be better to figure out where they came from and put them back instead of overwriting them. Hopefully, if he was lucky, there’d been some kind of 1:1 replacement, and the missing bits of nav data were all still intact, just switched into whatever part of the memory the new junk had come from.
None of the other systems were showing problems, though. And there was one larger portion of the nav system memory that seemed to be sealed off entirely; his efforts to read it were returning a sort of acknowledgement, rather than any useful information: yes, I can see you’re trying to access this data. Well done! I ain’t telling you shit. He couldn’t even tell whether it was corrupted in the same way as the other patches. Every approach he tried yielded the same lack of result, as if he was running into a wall that had no doors.
That…shouldn’t be possible. He had systemwide access with administrator privileges. More worryingly, he was pretty sure that the inaccessible portion held the data for their origin point – the thing all their distances and angles were calculated from. If that were corrupted…well, they’d be lost. Literally.
Sollux groaned, burying his face in his hands. There was one other person on board who had easy access to the navigation system, not counting Feferi, who of course also had systemwide access, but only used the messaging app, and possibly Kanaya, who had once blundered her way into the files for Equius’s 3D printer and somehow confused it into trying to print a shirt.
No point in putting it off. Sollux saved his work and stormed out of the room, intending to go find Eridan.
…And possibly kick his ass.