The Falling Bird
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Following GAS’ orders, Peter spent every day in the ship’s cockpit, checking the operations of all systems. He was quite savvy in electronics, having a background in engineering and machine programming. And because the ship had been assembled in a hurry and had been flown in automated mode twice as long as had been planned, many manual control units just didn’t respond to his commands – red lights kept turning on to report a problem. Peter was taking them apart, pinging back and forth, pinpointing the damaged parts and faulty electronic boards, and replacing them with the new ones – luckily, spare microchips, diodes, and capacitors were all in plentiful supply on the ship.
The designers and contractors foresaw that the huge rush the spaceship was being built in, breakdowns during the flight would be unavoidable, and prudently loaded the ship with several boxes of all kinds of parts.
Peter had to work quickly as the ship was finishing its slowdown – very soon, when Hopus’ orbit was reached, he was supposed to switch to manual control. Sometimes he even was sleeping in the cockpit, leaving it only to have a bite in his cabin. It was during those routine trips through the hallway between the two spaces when he ran into the little boss. His fellow crew members had told him about some child, who appeared out of nowhere and was running back and forth, poking his nose into everything and trying to give orders on GAS’ behalf. But Peter was ignoring what others were saying, assuming that it was some new advanced robotic assistant of GAS, and after colliding with the buster in the hallway immediately forgot about him.
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