2 Reality bytes

*BEEP BEEP BEEP*

My eyes snapped open at the loud sound of the alarm to wake me up.

"Damn nightmare," I cussed as I wiped the sweat off my brow, and looked up at the front viewer of the dimly lit deck.

The dark cosmos of space peppered with numerous twinkling stars and the three nearby orbiting planets greeted me.

The front viewer also displayed the ship's core functions. Everything looked normal.

My fingers toggled through the command modules, on the side arms of my pilot chair, to adjust a warmer setting for environmental controls.

This ship, an old war-cruiser-turned-space-caravan-of-a-home, stayed in orbit above the pole of an uninhabited planet, to escape detection

I blinked my eyes a few times and gazed down on the glass floor of the war cruiser's deck, relieved at the sight of a pale brownish planet brightened by the light of its yellow dwarf star.

*BUZZZZZZ*

I swivelled the pilot chair around in time to see the familiar spiraling swarm of mini grey mechanized droids flying into the deck to form the feet first, an arm's length from me.

Each droid, formed out of a few million tightly packed atomites, is no bigger than the tip of my little finger.

No humanoid species, even with the keenest sight, can see the individual atomites with their naked eye.

If 100,000 atomite combined, they are as visible as a hair follicle.

Several trillion atomites made up the thousands of droids in Arabaki's grey swarm form.

The swarm of droids chose a name - Arabaki, to interact with me.

My hands applauded the painstaking efforts of Arabaki. The latest challenge set by the droid swarm is to form a humanoid body. My clapping stopped when Arabaki's form struggled, miserably, to complete a humanoid figure above the waist.

I cringed as the swarm of droids crumbled like a cascading waterfall, only stopping midway to the ground, transforming into a large floating face with a frown.

"Damn it," Arabaki cussed in the droids' usual multi-tonal voice.

I coughed politely, without a word.

"Screw you," Arabaki muttered.

My index finger pointed at the right floor cabinet. "Screw drill is inside there."

Gone were the days where ignorance was pure bliss when I didn't know the atomites' true capabilities to form a hive-like artificial intelligence, with the personality of a dickhead on its own.

Then again, my people never gave me a choice on whether I wanted their cybernetic technology.

An experimental atomite system was implanted in me, turning me into half machine, half flesh.

Had I known the side effects and the trouble, perhaps I would have objected vehemently.

Arabaki began as part of my secret experiments to replace atomites in my body, after watching the demise of those implanted with the same atomite system.

From a small talking cube, Arabaki soon grew into talkative metal-mineral munching glutton with an artificial intelligence rivaling even mine.

Arabaki formed a wavy figure out of the droids, reminding me of the shadowy wisps in my nightmare.

"Arabaki!" I smacked my forehead. "Who is looking after the mainframe if you're playing around?"

"What're you on about… don't you know there are millions of me slogging over your damn ship? I'M HUNGRY! FEED ME!"

"You ate a derelict ship yesterday."

Arabaki's wavy face changed into the shape of an arrow pointing at the display panel on the left of the small ship.

A vast improvement from yesterday's tantrum thrown by a giant talking face of Arabaki yelling into my face, while spitting tiny droids out like saliva.

"DERELICT SHIPS DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MATERIALS TO REPLACE YOUR OLD ASS SHIP PARTS, NUMBNUTS!"

Maybe no improvement. A splatter of small droids flicked my cheeks again and quickly returned to the changing arrow formation of the droids.

I went to look at the display panel after flicking my middle finger at Arabaki. Fortunately, the power is almost at full charge after we swooped down on the yellow dwarf star to charge the solar cells.

<Hull: degenerative damages to the aft right, panel replacement needed>

I cannot imagine how old this ship is. Arabaki built, maintained and made minor changes at each opportunity, so the age never showed.

Arabaki had no way of fixing the cell. Droids can't build organic biomass cells nor can they imitate the special organic cells. My biomass generator is the backup to the solar cells.

If the main power generator fails, the biomass generator provided enough power to get to a nearby system.

I would need high grade quartz crystals to repair the solar cells which powered the main generator.

Most derelict ships which the droids ate up, only used low grade quartz left.

If over 15 of the solar collector cells blow, there won't be enough power for the shields to run past through a star to harvest its energy.

The mention of the sonic washing room caught my eye. I preferred cleanliness over filth.

"I'm going to Eden," I said with the buzzing droids struggling to maintain their formation of Arabaki's levitating face.

"Why? That place is crawling with patrol ships. Why not the Narakan system?"

Patrol ships or not, Arabaki lacked the experience of shopping for parts in this galactic sector by choice. The swarm refused to interact with any biological beings except me.

The dealers on Eden, a wealthy planet, sold the highest grade quartz, and other advanced tech components which we needed for repairs. Not to mention, they sold the best sonic washing equipment.

In the Narakan system, scammers overran the tech markets with hard-to-detect counterfeits. Counterfeit parts always broke down less than one cycle of use.

"Shall you buy or I buy?" I asked.

This straightforward question always stumped the droid swarm.

"Fine. That's not the end of the shopping list," Arabaki told me as the display started scrolling through the endless shopping list of items.

"Those purchases need a lot of aurum, or diamond stock! Which mine are we going to rob?"

"Well. We left the ship while you were sleeping—"

I stood, arms akimbo. "And?"

The droids can navigate through the vacuum of space without a problem. With nothing around, my best guess was the planet below.

They will never survive atmospheric entry into the planet, unless they took my smaller merchant transport ship for a joyride there.

"Well, just follow us," Arabaki said as the face melted back into the swirling swarm of droids moving past three rooms towards the back of the war cruiser, where the cargo bay is located.

I parked a small tatty looking merchant class transport ship there.

"Did you take the merchant transport ship down?"

No reply from the moving droid swarm. Only their buzz and my boot steps echoed through the corridor as we transversed along the path to the cargo bay. That merchant class transport ship was on its last legs of service.

The cargo door slid aside automatically.

In the cargo bay, a haphazardly parked merchant ship was surrounded by junk organized in untidy piles. Its small cargo mover-forklift was stationed behind the bay door of the ship.

I knew it! Damn droids went for a joyride down to the planet's surface on the merchant class ship during my sleep.

Some wiring bundled into piles. A stack of half droid-chewed metals dumped on the side.

My eyes spotted a heap of small rocks littered on the ground.

"There," the Arabaki swarm formed a talking arrow above the rocks. "Aurum and diamonds. We figured the list will cost a lot."

I strolled towards the rock heap and bent down to pick one dirty looking rock to examine visually with my optical implants.

[Detected metal: Aurum]

[Structure: Crystalline]

[Grade: Raw Pure 99.9]

[Detected mineral: Quartz]

[Grade: Low with multiple impurities]

[Others: insubstantial qualities of magnetite, iron pyrites, ilmenite, rutile and barytes]

[Estimated weight… calculating]

The rock weighed heavily on my hand, but the weight may belong to the encasing quartz. Still crystalline aurum is rare.

[Estimated weight of Aurum: 450 m]

My heart almost skipped a beat. The value of this rock can buy half and more of the shopping list.

I glanced at the heap - counting silently. There's around 42 rocks to examine.

"Well?"

I gave Arabaki a thumbs up and got up to enter the ship. Arabaki's swarm form of droids predicted my direction and immediately flew in front of me, blocking my way with a smiling face formation.

I narrowed my eyes at Arabaki and asked, "What happened to the ship?"

"Well…," The swarm kept moving as though fidgety, like a child caught red-handed.

"Do you want me to use this old war cruiser to enter Eden?"

"No…"

Arabaki hated bringing the old war cruiser near Eden's planetary system.

Perhaps five hundred galactic cycles ago, other spacefaring species feared this obsolete war cruiser.

Not any more.

The firepower of the bigger patrol ships scared the droids.

"FIX MY MERCHANT SHIP THEN!"

"FINE!" Arabaki retorted with some of its droids falling from its hasty reaction.

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