Corebound Chapter 35 (Patreon)

Things were going smoothly for Jacob. He had saved his fellow abductees and finally gotten them out of his apartment, even if it was only temporarily. While he didn’t mind them being there, having all three there at all times was overwhelming, especially after being alone for so long. Hell, he hadn’t even slept since they had arrived, because the two bedrooms were being used by Katty or Katherine, and Franky.

He didn’t really require sleep, and if he did, he could just create a disconnected bedroom, or even another bedroom in the apartment, but it was nice to pretend sometimes. It was the same with consuming food.

Sure, he defaulted to eating cereal most days, but that’s because he liked cereal, and any attempt to make something better always resulted in the final object tasting off. Jacob wasn’t quite sure how that was possible since he was recreating food from memory, but it was.

Speaking of rooms, he would probably need to add another if Barry intended to stick around in the apartment. So far, none of the three had bothered to do anything with the basic rooms he had created for them. Considering how long it had taken them to control the drones, they probably didn’t have the mental control to manage such a change. Then again, Barry might. So far, he was the only one of the trio to grasp the concept that he could change whatever he wanted inside the virtual space, even if it was by accident, and he had only performed the feat one time.

Given the fact that the man wanted to be an engineer, it made sense that he would have a better grasp of what was happening. Honestly, Jacob was glad someone had decided to go that route. Despite the fact that Jacob had been saddled with a plethora of engineering and repair knowledge, that didn’t mean he liked designing and building stuff. He didn’t really dislike it either; he just wouldn’t have picked it as a job if given an option. He did it because he had to.

Franky, on the other hand, certainly didn’t seem like the high-IQ type or even the type to pursue any sort of higher learning. He came across as some pampered rich kid who never had to work a day in his life or was ever told no, which is why Jacob was shocked that the man had picked a maintenance role.

Jacob had firsthand experience with how awful it was maintaining old Concord systems, but to each their own. It’s not like being a junior maintenance technician could get him into much trouble. The station handled all of its own internal maintenance, and Jacob had ensured the role didn’t provide access to anything important.

The station wasn’t like Melody’s hull, where some maintenance areas were nothing more than crawl spaces. The station’s maintenance corridors were much wider, but they weren’t wide enough to fit a full-sized maintenance drone. Jacob was surprised to see that until he learned that the maintenance drones came in three sizes. The regular one, a half-sized one, and one that was a third the size of the normal maintenance drone. The maintenance corridors aboard the station were large enough to fit the half-sized drones, and the smallest units could just barely fit in the crew passages aboard Melody, which made repairing those areas much easier. He still wondered why the fabrication center aboard Melody hadn’t included designs for the smaller drones.

As for Katherine, he didn’t really know much about the woman other than she was gorgeous. If it wasn’t for the huge chip on her shoulder, he might have even been attracted to her. Not that it mattered if he was or not, Jacob saw the disdain for him in her eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking.

He couldn’t blame her entirely. Their situation was pretty messed up, and being a woman in a mainly male-dominated space—the leader boards for Omacron Six, not the apartment—couldn’t have been easy. Jacob was sure she faced far more scrutiny than her male counterparts in the game. It wasn’t right, but that’s just how things were in most competitive games. That didn’t give her a pass to be violent towards others, however.

He wasn’t even counting her attack on Franky. The man had provoked her on purpose, and it had gotten a response, but probably a more aggressive one than Franky had been expecting. Franky might be a shallow asshole, but he couldn’t be entirely stupid if he made his way up the leaderboards and had a thriving streaming career before being plucked out of his home by Melody.

Jacob paused at that thought. Melody had plucked him from his friend’s apartment sometime in the early morning. He recalled that his friend liked to stream during those hours. In fact, a lot of streamers would have been active around that time. With how damaged Melody was, one, if not all of them, might have been plucked from their homes during a live stream. He winced at the implications of multiple alien abductions being live-streamed across the world.

It wasn’t like there wouldn’t be other evidence, either. The giant holes that the science drones made using their void cannons weren’t exactly subtle. Neither were the drones, since they weren’t equipped with any sort of stealth systems or any systems capable of hiding them from radar. Jacob wasn’t sure how they got to the surface, but he suspected they simply transitioned near the ground using their phase coils.

It wasn’t like there was a distance limitation when it came to using the phase coils. The only reason Melody had appeared so far from the station when they first arrived was to keep the ship from breaking apart as it encountered the station’s gravitational field, which was saying a lot since the field outside the station wasn’t very strong. Based on what he knew now, he was glad the AI had chosen caution.

As for Earth, it was either in a full-blown panic or the alien abductions were yesterday’s news by now. As much as Jacob would like to know, he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind. Now that Barry, Katherine, and Franky were situated, he needed to concentrate on finishing the shield generator installation.

He had far more hands to help now, since he produced more bipedal drones, but it was still going to take at least a year to finish installing the shield generators around the station. Unfortunately, the new bipedal drones were all automated.

He thought about asking the others if they wanted to help, but decided that working in space would be far too jarring for them at such an early stage in their development. He also locked down all the other drones to prevent them from overwhelming themselves or experiencing a similar disassociation by hopping into multiple bodies as he did on occasion. The feeling of being inside a body that didn’t quite fit could drive a person mad.

Jacob might have overcome that problem by sheer determination to survive, but it didn’t mean it had gone away entirely. He still felt like he was wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit right when he hopped into a new drone or one he didn’t use often. That was only one symptom; each drone seemed to have its own special little hell. The worst by far was one drone that felt like the tag of a shirt was constantly rubbing against his neck, and no matter what he did, it wouldn’t go away. He wasn’t proud to admit it, but he had recycled that drone after only a few minutes of experiencing that particular torture.

With how busy he was, he couldn’t really afford to recycle drones, but sometimes it was better to get rid of a problem before it festered. Besides, he was making progress. The core section of the station had been completed, so the most sensitive areas were protected. He wanted to upgrade the transport with shields as well, but when he considered it, he decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Sha’la had been right. The transport would require a new reactor to produce enough power for a shield generator.

Shields were good, but after installing so many, and from what he heard on the ads, they weren’t some impenetrable barrier. If they were, there wouldn’t need to be dozens of different models, all with different energy storage capacities, discharge rates, and a dozen other variables. The station had more than enough power to spare because its reactors were enormous and numerous. Even if the station was running at full power, Jacob suspected it had a vast surplus of energy to draw from.

The transport, on the other hand, was an eight-hundred-year-old relic left behind because it was likely outdated even during the station’s decommissioning. He was surprised that he even got the new phase coil to work with the ship. He wasn’t about to push more upgrades onto the ancient vessel. He couldn’t afford to lose the ship until the new merchants arrived. Speaking of, the ship had just returned to unload the next delivery.

Only having to spend the bare minimum of time in that drone had certainly sped up his construction efforts. Unfortunately, the ship was showing stress fractures from being used so frequently, so now it was grounded until it could be repaired.

The only upside was that Jacob didn’t have to do those repairs himself. Now that the station had access to more maintenance drones, it could repair the vessel itself, similarly to how it was repairing Melody’s hull. Fixing the transport would be multiple orders of magnitude easier, but repairs on Melody were showing slow but steady progress.

The vessel his mind was housed in would never be the same as it had been when it was new, but when it was complete, it would actually be spaceworthy once again. Even after seeing the damage, Jacob hadn’t known just how precarious their trip had been until the station AI had shown him a stress diagram.

Half of the ship was shown in black, which meant that those sections could collapse at any moment. Another quarter of the ship was displayed in an angry red color, meaning they weren’t far behind. The rest was yellow and orange. There wasn’t a single structural piece of the vessel that showed as green. Jacob had assumed the ship’s systems were in the worst condition, but he had been wrong. The station AI was slowly reinforcing those locations before it could begin any other work.

Jacob had wanted to scream at Melody when he first learned just how much damage there was, but that had been shortly after finding out about his memories, and he hadn’t been on speaking terms with Melody back then. He also assumed it would downplay the issue or outright lie to him to ensure it could continue its objective. That’s what he thought until he went through the records that Melody had left him. There was nothing to indicate that the AI had any clue how bad the ship’s structure was. That almost made the reckless galivanting across space even worse. Even if Melody had known, Jacob was sure that the AI would have suggested they go to the station anyway.

It was an easy accusation to make now that Jacob had access to the restrictions Melody had been under. Just because the AI was restricted from harming its crew didn’t outweigh its core directive of completing its mission, which Jacob also learned was to terraform Earth. No surprise there. All that meant was that Melody would have gladly gambled with Jacob’s life if there was even a small chance of it reaching the station to make repairs.

Jacob sighed. He couldn’t blame the AI entirely. If he were in Melody’s situation, he would have done the same thing.