Terra Error 404

After so many years of traveling around the Solaverse in the Arks having technical issues with their bodged together loosely called "internet" and the aging tech on their ships the ancestors didn't take long in naming this star Terra Error 404 after colonising the local nebula.....

If it could go wrong it did go wrong, from failed missoins to failed partnerships and collaborations!! But then something happened, the exact point in time no one can remember, a turning point that has changed the fortunes of everyone and everything that inhabits this rejoin.

Some say you had to be born here to get it, some say you just have to live here long enough you can learn it, others say, it cant be learnt only felt like a six sense. What it is no one knows but how it affects you is plain to see and it makes this place one of the most sort after places in new thinking and innovation in The Solaverse.

So what is this sense or ability, well for that you just have to witness it for yourself. When you meet someone from this rejoin you won't necessarily see or know that there is anything different about them until there a problem to solve.

And here's where things get interesting........

The earliest anyone can remember about its beginnings was when some of the children who had very little to do or play with on the arks used to hang round with the companions. Most children avoided them as they were not the most reliable AI robots and scared them when they had glitches and did unexpected things.

Now the children who did like the companions company spent most of their days with them and it’s said that they were fascinated with the way that the AI approached problems with unusual solutions that humans would never have thought of. It was like the children learnt a completely new way of problem solving that no human had ever been exposed to and as they grew, not only did they spend more time with the companions but they even started to work with them and take on repair tasks themselves.

One fateful event that a lot of stories have been inspired by was when one of the arks started to lose power just as it was passing the gravity effects of a dark hole. The companions sprung into action with their apprentices in tow, by this time they had become teenage children. As they got to the engine control room it became obvious this was not a easy fix and something was very wrong. The engine room itself was contaminated with residue from the crystal fuel source that had not been completely infused by the engines. This was a side effect of not having the engines running at 100% efficiency and one of the many things that the companions didn’t always manage to keep on top of.

But this time it was bad and all the companions on the ark spring into the engine room to deal with the residue as they were the only ones not affected by the toxins. This was their first mistake as they should never have of all have gone inside, the moment the decontamination door shut behind them the engine fluxed and produced a spike of power that the capacitors couldn’t handle and the mainframe computer that controlled most of the systems on the ark scrambled and started to reboot. In normal conditions the ship would just coast in space until the reboot completed while basic backup systems kept the life support systems ticking over. But in this case things just got very scary very quickly as the dark hole gravity immediately started to draw the ship not only off course but straight for the event horizon.

Stories told about this time tell a variety of different scenarios from complete horror and panic from the arks inhabitants to a lot milder concern. But all the stories are the same when it comes to how the children apprentices reacted knowing that the companions trapped in the engine room were the only ones who had the skills to override the controls and manually restart the engines while the computer was rebooting. The reboot percentage on the screen of the control panels all over the ark was a very real reminder that the main computer was not going to reboot before the ship was torn apart by the gravitational forces of the dark hole.

Now the thing that makes this next part a big indicator to the beginning of this 6th sense is the way the children reacted to the problem without even discussing the situation. They each ran off in different directions grabbing parts and anything they thought would assist in their objective! The adults watched on completely oblivious to what was happening and what the children were actually doing. They seemed to work as one collective rather than individuals and after a short time it became obvious that they were trying to manually override the engine room doors. At the same time the companions not only seemed to understand what was going on but barely blinked from the task of clearing up the residue and venting the toxins. They knew that as soon as the children opened the doors there would be no time to go through decontamination and needed the air in the engine room to be clean and breathable so they didn’t contaminate the rest of the ship. But they needed access to the control room to get the engines fired up before it was too late.

The children worked in virtual silence with the odd “yes” and “that’s it” to spur each other on and within seconds of the companions completing the engine room clean up and turning towards the doors the children engergised their unlocking contraception with batteries taken from several tools and all the doors simultaneously opened. All the companions raced out and into the control room past the roaring cheers of the children celebrating their success. They immediately overrode the engines controls, firing them up and manually steering the ship out of the gravitational effects of the dark hole and back into relative safety until the computer completed its reboot.

After this the children were assigned assistant engineer positions and actively encouraged to spend more time learning from the companions. They even started taking on some of the tasks the companions had them completely forgotten about after their glitches started to become more frequent. This was to become a disturbing new chapter….