The engineering spaces of the station were relatively large and overall shaped like a cylinder that was in the centre of the ovoid body of the station. In fact, from diagrams of similar stations, it kind of looked like an octopus with a soda can in its gullet, in Ash's opinion.

This area comprised not just the engineering spaces for the main reactor but more or less all of the behind the scenes equipment and machinery that was necessary for the operation of a small space station, such as maintenance bays for a myriad of types of bots, equipment fabs, network and computing infrastructure and machine rooms.

To Ash's eyes, everything looked pretty spartan and utilitarian. The public-facing areas had a lot more space and purely decorative items and trim. He couldn't see the colours in the other areas of the station, but he suspected it was not uniformly grey. It was similar to seeing the front lobby of a nice hotel and then the back areas where they washed the linens.

Humans of the future did not do much work, he decided. From a cursory examination of history and sociology files of the future, he concluded that even the poorest of humans would be considered rich beyond the dreams of avarice to him. Maybe they couldn't afford a custom-built sapient companion android with a bespoke personality to follow them around. Still, with the price of energy and everyday materials so cheap, they could have a dozen regular bots or lesser AIs doing their bidding.

He suspected humans rarely came into these engineering areas, which made him wonder why they were pressurised in the first place. Possibly because a human might have to be ultimately responsible in an emergency? Speaking of which, he had to stop an internal process from regenerating his skin. Baby soft skin wasn't a priority right now.

He floated through the door of a machine room. There were a couple of maintenance spider bots inside docking stations, and they might even be operational. He muses aloud, "The entire network is down, though. From what I know, even if severely damaged, a network should still be available. Even with the entirety of the computer infrastructure destroyed, each bot and piece of equipment will create an ad-hoc mesh network."

There clearly wasn't a lot of power available, but there was some. Some bots and equipment should still be running on their contingency programming, even if it is only one or two. Had they been put in standby mode gracefully, then? And if so, by whom?

He stared at the half dozen or so spider bots and directed a general-purpose wakeup packet towards them. Even shutdown equipment usually has a radio fractionally powered, as that is how ubiquitous network command and control is in the future. He doubts general-purpose maintenance bots like these even have any physical switches on their body.

Although there are no LED lights that powered up cinematically, there were six identical beacon broadcasts from the bots as they powered up. Then there was a quick crossfire of interrogation packets from each bot to each and to Ash himself. He found himself framejacking to a high speed to inspect the packets as they came in. The headers had metadata about each bot, such as model and serial number and capabilities. There was also a field that said that they were all unclaimed space salvage and would accept a new owner, as well as a field suggesting an ad-hoc network cluster be formed.

His first minions! Ash started the process of rubbing his hands together in glee, although his body appeared to be moving in super slow motion. One part of him was thinking about how weird it was that his brain operated so much faster than his body could keep up with while a few other threads were allowing his systems to respond to the bots with his identity packet automatically. Receipt of the packet by the bots triggered a complex set of handshakes between him and each bot where encryption capabilities were interrogated, agreed upon, and public encryption keys exchanged.

His hands had not even gotten a couple of inches close together, much less started to rub in glee when something made him change the instructions to grip angrily and stomp once with his foot. He dropped out of the high frame rate he was in so that he wouldn't out-think his body and also so he could complain out loud, which was always a good stress relief, "What do you mean, I'm ineligible?"

Each bot had once encrypted two-way communications had been established, rejected him as a new owner. Apparently, only humans could own things. Their digital reply was the equivalent of these punk ass spiders saying, 'How could a couch own a pillow?' Ash shook his head and complained out loud, "What kind of bigoted assholes programmed and sold you..."

They did invite him to join their ad-hoc network, which he wanted to refuse but did not. These bots don't even meet the definition of a class I AI; they're just all databases and response and request trees, similar to Siri or Alexa from his previous life. Their neural network is less complicated than a mouse, and almost the entirety of that is used for spatial awareness.

The status of sapient AIs in the future or alternate universe is somewhat mixed. In most of the galaxy, they are considered something akin to serfs. Class III AIs are usually designed for a purpose, and the mind engineers make sure that every personality developed finds that purpose highly interesting and fulfilling. For example, a class III AI designed to supervise, manage and lead a swarm of asteroid mining bots would find geology and mining a gratifying endeavour and would seldom get bored doing it. On the other hand, a class III designed as a ship's technician to oversee maintenance would be highly interested in mechanical things and engineering.

A class IV, like his body, was originally, was different. In most of the galaxy, where the treatment of AIs was like serfs, they were often illegal for general deployment or highly restricted because they present the highest risk for AI uprisings.

These are societies where humans often live like sultans and haven't worked a day in their life. What the movie Wall-E got wrong is that humans never really get stupid; if anything, they were more intelligent than ever, so all societies like this respect the danger of machines that have general planning and goal-seeking intelligence equivalent to them.

In more enlightened areas, it is illegal to manufacture class IV AIs unless you provide for them as you might a child as they are considered legally equal to humans... but most of the galaxy is somewhere in the middle. It is clear, however, that this space station was in an unenlightened jurisdiction.

Researching why these spiders were oppressing him also gave him an answer as to why the engineering areas were pressurised. Perhaps he didn't realise how high-end he was, but it was much cheaper for most human form AIs to be organic. The bodies which were the most inferior might be synthetic, but they tended to fall into the uncanny valley and wouldn't be used in any human might ever see them.

It didn't cost that much to build a primarily organic body with a computer for a brain, apparently. He wondered how many of the bodies he recalled seeing were androids, then. A fully synthetic body like his that was virtually indistinguishable from a person's, inside and out, was rare and expensive. He probably cost as much as a small starship even before his semi-mystical upgrades.

Fabricators that could build lifeforms from nothing but carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and various other trace elements were highly specialised and somewhat finicky but ultimately a mature technology. It's not that great a step from printing a replacement organ according to a provided genome to building an entire body, after all. The hardest step was keeping the parts already printed alive and oxygenated while the rest of the body was printed.

He needed to take a firm hand with these bots. So he decided to combine a verbal command with wireless orders, "You will obey me!" Okay, maybe he did not need a firm hand. They had no problem doing that. Ash may not be a human to them, but he was the biggest swinging dick in the room as far as they were concerned. Bots and non-sapient AIs were very hierarchical and, without any conflicting orders, were designed to follow the instructions of anything more capable than them.

Ash downloaded a full station map from them and compared it with the 3d maps he had been generating on the fly. The shielded can of the engineering area was relatively intact, but almost everything else had significant damage and hull breaches ranging from a hairline crack to holes he could step through. On the way to engineering, he spent several minutes staring out of one such giant hole directly at a side of the moon he had never seen before. Being only 60,000km away from the moon, it looked huge to him, and the far side's strange and unusual pockmarked surface seemed eerie.

He sent the bots skittering out of the room with orders to reactivate all the maintenance bots in the engineering spaces, batteries permitting, and expand their network. Their method of zero-G locomotion was using some sort of attractor field on their feet and skittering up and along the walls and ceiling; it was vaguely creepy.

Although each spider looked more or less identical, they each included different tools and are intended to work together, simultaneously, depending on the job. His goal was still to reactivate the fusion power plant and secondarily find, identify and make safe the suspected fission power system. Was that what was providing power now?

According to the maps received from the spider bots, there was no installed backup fission power system installed in this station... or ANY backup power system of any kind beyond capacitors, batteries and power cells. Fission power in the future was very niche and specialised, usually used in sub-megawatt embedded miniature systems. The smallest sized fusion reactors were about the size of an aeroplane restroom or small closet. Miniaturising the containment of high energy plasma any further has been deemed improbable, but this area still remained a constant avenue of research despite hundreds of years of failure. Hell, people even researched cold fusion from what he could tell, despite it never working.

So, he suspected that the fusion reactor was going to be a bust. Someone must have survived the "time travel" and did exactly what he was doing right now. He started floating with a purpose towards the reactor area to confirm his suspicions.

The level of ionising radiation he was being bombarded with slowly crept up, plateauing at about 100 millisieverts per hour as he got close to the reactor room. That is pretty high, but it would take fifty to one hundred hours to kill a regular person for certain. He pauses slightly to correct that thought and feels a little emotion doing so—100 milligrays per hour. The sievert unit is only used to measure ionising radiation as it affects the health of the human body.

Three things stand out to him about the reactor room.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the fusion reactor, which is a spheroid whose size is larger than a Humvee but smaller than an APC, is partly disassembled.

One-quarter of the panelling, shielding and superconductors were removed, piled and tied down in the corner of the room, which allowed you to peer with your naked eyes (and radar transceivers) into the combustion torus itself. He isn't a qualified nuclear fusion specialist, but it looked fucked up beyond all recognition in his layman's opinion.

If he had to guess from the way the inner wall of the torus is deformed, he would say that containment was lost briefly, causing the plasma to expand and touch the inner walls of the reactor, trashing them before redundant safety features built behind the primary wall kicked in and scrammed the reactor.

Second, the output circuit has been disconnected from the fusion reactor and jury-rigged into what appears to be a nondescript fifty-five-gallon drum, which is the source of the radiation.

Lastly, and also quite important for his future plans, the fifty-five-gallon drum meets the specs for a generic fission battery system whose output is between two and five megawatts continuous, which while clearly enough to keep most bots topped off, it is more than an order of magnitude less than is needed to power one of the small industrial fabricators that might be useful in either creating replacement parts to repair the main reactor or a smaller auxiliary reactor.

Well, fuck.