Although now Ash is "very concerned" that his initial plans seem hopeless, this didn't stop him from analysing his situation and moving along to secondary objectives. His brood of bots has grown to a little more than two hundred of various models, but only about half are designed for reliable zero-G locomotion. Moreover, only a small number of the cohort of bots that can't move are helpful anyway; most are things along the lines of cleaning robots designed for use in everyday operations. A couple, though, are heavy tracked articulated plasma cutter tools that he will likely have a need for sooner rather than later.

A request over the network sends a spherical diagnostic bot floating into the reactor room. It's shiny black and sort of looks like a smaller version of the iconic Interrogation Droids from Star Wars. It appears to be moving with a reactionless drive, which is impossible, so Ash queries its design spec curiously. While anti-gravity and reactionless drives are impossible, there is a technology that Ash would have considered equally improbable -- some sort of tractor slash repulsor field.

It functions almost like a tunable universal magnetic field that allows emitters to attract or repel either all matter or even only specific types. Although the field couldn't propagate too far from the emitter, you could tune a field to react only to certain phases of matter or even to specific atomic weights. That made him come up short, as that was even more useful and twice as magical as anti-gravity, in his opinion. The first idea that came to his mind was an electrically powered no-cleaning required super filter that you never needed to replace. Or a vacuum that only sucked in radioactive isotopes, given his current situation.

The creepy little football hovered over to the fission pile and started circling it like it was a cat that wanted to take a piece out of it. It was then that Ash realised that his ideas for utilising tractor fields were amateur hour at best.

Someone a lot smarter than he realised that if you could tune these fields so finely that you could, in effect, create a non-invasive scanning device. By iterating through each element and phase of matter while expanding the tractor field and using the tiniest bit of power to the field, barely enough to excite the molecules, you could keep track of how much energy was necessary to activate the field for each element. You could then infer from the power usage the relative concentration and position of elements one by one. Combining all this data together gave you an almost molecular level three dimensional scan of an object.

Wow, talk about making X-rays obsolete. Ash bets doctors of the future thought shooting a person with ionising radiation in order to get a diagnostic image of their body's interior was about the same level as insanity as bleeding a patient with leeches.

The diagnostic bot has a chipper, happy feeling on the network as it transfers the scan file, and Ash has the urge to pet it. But, instead, he sent a Bravo Zulu packet and ordered the machine to return to its duties as he inspected the scan. Wow, this one file is five hundred times larger than his entire ... video collection in his past life. This made Ash pause as he considered his family briefly, "Thankfully, my son is dutiful and should have destroyed my hard drive as I requested, inshallah."

A defect in manufacturing the shielding material was the reason for the radiation leak. Everything except the actual radioactive fuel was made of quick-fab materials, and although the fact that the system was still generating power at all was a testament to the genius of the designer, it is clear that the person who built this did not intend to rely on it for long. The micro-fissures in the shielding material probably didn't propagate right away, maybe even offering a month of useful service before occurring. He frowns and pushes away from the floor, doing an elegant and twisting 180 bounce off the overhead to change directions out of the reactor room.

Still, one part of his brain is beginning a repair plan for that reactor, but he is wondering if it is a big deal after all. He bets if he could power up the ventilation and air filters, the radioisotopes would rapidly be filtered out of the air. But, of course, it will depend on what else he can find. Despite having a brain full of knowledge, he realises he still didn't know anything useful to his current predicament. Finally, however, things are looking up. The bots have discovered storage areas that were obviously repurposed as simple dormitories for between forty and fifty people.

"So there WERE survivors, huh?" Ash mused to himself. He didn't know why but this kind of upsets him. One exciting thing about being a digital intelligence is that he has a lot better understanding of how his brain works and his feelings, and moreover, he can't really lie to himself about them. He's upset because he thought he was going to be unique, namely the only person with knowledge from the future "brought back in time." These survivors seemed like competitors to his plans, almost. Did they evacuate to the planetary surface? It would depend on how many resources they had, he finally decided. He personally did not plan to step foot on Earth until after he had a robust orbital and lunar infrastructure and supply chain, for example. The tyranny of gravity is not to be underestimated.

Something did not sit right with him about this idea though, why would survivors have left this space station intact? Even if it could not be repaired, it was a wealth of rare metals and elemental feedstock. If he can't fix it himself, he plans to boost it out of danger of falling into the moon and into an eccentric orbit where he can mine it for raw materials at his leisure. The materials contained here might save him years of initial start-up time on a Lunar mining and heavy industry project. That compounded overtime was an incalculable amount of benefits one would throw away.

Well, what he lacked was knowledge, and that decided his next stop -- the network and computing mainframe. If he could get the datanet back up then, he could access by hook or crook all the messages, logs and data recorded by the station and probably all its inhabitants, too. Not to mention control of all the network-controlled devices, including, for example, the tractor field plates in the floor that are used to simulate gravity. A few megawatts might not be enough to provide forces necessary to simulate full gravity over the entire engineering can, though. However, just a tenth of a G would be enough to get the rest of his bots moving.

As he floated past a humanoid-shaped bot that kind of looked like the B1 droids from Clone Wars, which was flowing in the opposite direction, it occurred to him that this station didn't appear to have much redundancy in its design at all. The European Space Agency would probably require triply redundant power systems and perhaps not appreciate safety-critical functions like air filtration, gravity and most lighting being entirely network-controlled. Why are they so blasé about safety? Have they lived in space so long that it didn't appear to be a hazardous environment anymore?

He picked a random design of interstellar cargo freighter to glance at as he made his way to the network operations centre and simultaneously watched a recorded lecture on the introduction to civil engineering in microgravity applications. No, the starship is very redundant. Two identical fusion plants, each of which could power the entire ship, multiple auxiliaries, and decentralised network infrastructure on each deck. He stopped listening to the lecture after he got the gist of the design philosophy which explained the discrepancies.

It was considered an unnecessary expense to build most classes of small space stations so redundantly. Most space stations are very close to other space stations, so their redundancy is their peers offering support. So long as people can escape during an emergency, that is fine. Starships, on the other hand, which might be days or weeks away from port, need to be designed in such a way that they can take engineering casualties and still arrive safely at their destination.

Even a mathematical formula is available that takes the input of how many rescuers are available, their average response time, and how far they are away and returns a potential redundancy factor to use in picking designs. This station had to be within two thousand kilometres from at least three or four similar stations, or the builders just did not care for the lives of those inside the station. Ash wondered what the people on those other stations thought when they responded to the emergency and found three-fourths of a space station missing.
Ash floated into the area of engineering that was filled with racks and racks of computers. Still, this station did not even have a one-car network to his arbitrary scale of how big the network operations centre was when compared to a one or two-car garage. Surprisingly there WAS a terminal designed for human interactions and some switches. Ash flipped a large guarded switch from the OFF to the ON position, which caused an audible hum as about two dozen racks of electronics started to power up.

Shortly thereafter, he started noticing thousands of transmissions from every conceivable direction. The datanet was sputtering to life. Ash had considered trying to forge or impersonate a human's identity packet, and he was reasonably confident he could pull it off despite the lack of an identity provider's private encryption key but ultimately felt that it was a waste of time. Although these are considered mainframe computing resources here, it is not as though Ash will have to contend with some other AI guarding the network, and if there were, it would be at most an artificial stupid. Information security has changed, but one truism still remains, ultimately physical access is everything.
Finally, the system recombobulated itself, and a standard datanet appeared, which Ash joined using his existing identity as an AI. The local datanet manager was a class 1 AI, barely more intelligent than a bot, and it was designed more for smooth network resource allocation than security. Most typical security protocols were suspended anyway, considering the station was regarded as a wreck. Ash easily elevated his privileges and began examining information about the station, its purpose and logs.

Ash was floating in the wreck of a research station belonging to the government of the Solar Union, apparently a successor state to all governments on Earth and the entire solar system, too!

To say that he was highly sceptical that this was possible was an understatement, no matter how many years had passed. There are people who have been doing their best to murder each other wholesale on Earth for thousands of years. So, Ash didn't think it likely that there would be no constant strife in such a union?

Ash has to admit when he was wrong, and in this case, he was wrong. There were no complaints from anyone on Earth!
Because everyone on Earth was dead! And had been for almost a thousand years.

The so-called Solar Union was primarily centred around the Moon, Mars and various semi-autonomous city-states built in and around large asteroids. A large hollowed-out rock can hold a lot of people and things, after all.

To call the Solar Union, a third rate state in the future was an insult to third rate states. All it had going for was that it contained Earth, the historical home of mankind, which was a radioactive pile of rubble. The only living things bigger than cockroaches and leeches were the bioweapons designed to kill anything that moved. Nobody wanted it, and it would be cheaper and significantly less dangerous to terraform an existing airless ball of rock like Mars or Luna than contend with the birthplace of humanity.

This station wasn't didn't even have a primary research focus. From advancements in FTL to studying Earth itself, it was eclectic. It certainly didn't appear to be a location where Top Men studied time travel.

Ash pursed his lips and continued checking the logs, homing in on a time where things went bonkers with emergency alerts out the wazoo. Then, using that time index as a clue, he switches to checking the internal video records. Well, he could have started there, to begin with, and quickly found the correct time because that is where all video recordings except those in the engineering can cease abruptly.
He browses each view until he finds what he is looking for. In one of the ample research rooms assigned to Professor Ebenezer Flood, there is activity. "What an awful name..." Ash remarks before pulling up a closeup of the gentleman's face. "Holy shit, what a worse face. This guy looks like the scary dude from Poltergeist. I thought these people didn't age..."

Checking his user profile, he finds that Professor Flood was studying "non-conventional intra-universe FTL travel and transitions." Humanity travels FTL by a piece of equipment called the Matryoshka Harmonizer, although most people call them hyperspace converters. The device allows travel to alternate universes, so-called matryoshka-verses, that are progressively and exponentially smaller than the main universe. Since your relative position in all universes was preserved, this allowed a ship to travel at sublight speeds the entire time but effectively achieve superluminal travel when translating back into the main universe.

A type of FTL system that did not require one to travel through the hyperspace or matryoshka universes would be a massive military advantage, considering most system defences and surveillance systems are placed in expanding concentric spheres there with only last-ditch guards placed in the main universe. That explains why this research is being conducted in a government-run facility, even if this Flood guy seemed like a kook. But, of course, anyone who chose to look like that in an era where it is possible to perform a complete nano-medical rebuild of your body to look like whatever you like is leaning a bit too hard into the trope of a mad scientist.

Ash examined every possible recording just prior to the "incident", as he has been calling it in his head. The recordings are not merely visual but also include datanet tags which form the basis of something akin to an Augmented Reality system that is almost universally utilised. At most basic, it identified everyone who broadcasts their identity packet and prints their name over their head, almost like you were playing a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. It also makes it easy to identify which human-looking beings are official humans and which are just androids in organic bodies.

Ash counted ninety-five real deal humans and over a thousand humanoid androids before the incident. Getting an accurate count of survivors was a bit difficult at first, but he finally put it at 24 humans and 16 androids. Apparently, humans are much more likely to have passive safety equipment or genetic or cybernetic advantages that would let someone survive a complete and rapid depressurisation. But even then, a good eight of the survivors were previously unidentified. Ah, they had been aboard one of the five ships docked to the station.
Wait, what?! Ships? Ash sometimes thinks he is an idiot. He didn't know why he is surprised a space station would have ships docked to it. The stupid station looks like an octopus, and those octopus arms are primarily for the docking of vessels, after all.
Ash begins a parallel search for data on the ships docked at the time of the incident. There were five.

An unnamed Solar Union governmental revenue cutter, hull number CR-129. That's a warship, even if his data suggests only barely. Designed for customs duty and in-system protection. While they almost always do have FTL capability, their hull and power systems are usually only intended to access the first and perhaps the second layer of hyperspace, which, while very useful for getting around the solar system quickly, is still too slow for proper interstellar travel. A trip to Alpha Centauri might take a month if you count the time needed to decelerate to a stop. But it is armed with high energy lasers and missiles tipped with nuclear warheads in the yield of gigatons. Ash hopes it survived and wasn't stolen.

Two interstellar tramp freighters of similar designs and capabilities. Even a small interstellar tramp freighter would make the biggest container ship look small, so that is an exciting option as well. In fact, each freighter was massed at least ten per cent of the station it was docked to. It's worth noting that both are listed as being Armed Merchantmen with a weapons loadout not too inferior to the proper warship.
Ash hums to himself. "Interesting, it seems that humanity's old stomping ground is dangerous enough that even the freighters visiting it are armed with nukes?" He tilts his head. Also, the words "Armed Merchantman" to his mind implies private ownership rather than some sort of naval auxiliary.

Ash is trying to wrap his head around this. Does this mean that private parties are allowed to own nuclear bombs or have his circuits fried? Americans. These must be Americans. Ash refuses to do research in his sociology and history databases. Honestly, he has to pace himself, and he thinks he wants to sit back and enjoy it when he reads about how Nuclear-Armed Space Galleons became a thing.

The last two ships are of a similar class as well, which appears to be built for speed as they are mostly engines. One is listed as an unnamed Solar Union aviso ship, which was a type of interstellar dispatch ship. Sadly the only way to communicate faster than light is to put your message and data on a ship and fly it to your recipient. It is also the only ship that is unarmed. That's the odd man out, and Ash suspects there must be some sort of agreement about unarmed dispatch boats being universally permitted travel rights.

The last ship is an armed personal yacht, about one and a half times as big as the revenue cutter. But what it might lack in terms of weapons loadout, he bets it makes up for in posh accommodation and giant engines.

Twenty four people and any androids they took with them could have fit on even the smallest one, the dispatch boat. Next, Ash needs to get sensors on what remains of each pier. He suspects that each ship may very well be intact, considering they all have to be built to withstand the substantial stresses FTL transitions impose. Finally, his suspicion about the ultimate reason no electronics were working in the central area of the station might be proved correct, too.

At first, while floating through the corridors, he thought an outside force acted on the space station itself and twisted it. But 3d maps of destroyed bots, humans and androids seemed to indicate that the twisting also happened to everything inside as well, albeit somewhat less. Computer circuits are delicate, not to mention brains, and some unknown force reaching into your everything and twisting and skewing probably resulted in instant death and permanent non-function for organic and machine alike.

That is similar to what is recorded as happening if a ship with insufficient shielding attempts an FTL translation. Perhaps that is what happens in any kind of transition to a different universe using this type of technology -- since this wasn't time travel but travel to an alternate universe, this might explain it. Space Stations do not usually incorporate the diamondoid manufacturing process that interstellar ships use. It's slow, carbon and energy expensive, and there is an awful lot of iron in most asteroid belts to utilise anyway.

Ash steadies himself to watch the recordings of the survivors every second that they're on the station. They might be his competitors here, and they might have nuclear missiles in their hands when Ash has nothing to hold in his hand but his limp dick. But, wait... he didn't even have that.