After a fairly sizable amount of time spent therapeutically dicking around in the sim, defacing every surface and available byte of data that I could get my grubby little fingers on with pieces of commercially purposeless artistic expression, I’d finally started turning my efforts towards more practical matters.
All told, I only had a little over two years in real time until I made landfall, and I needed to be ready.
So, the first thing I did was delete my awful little fascistic helper AI out of existence. That thing had been more a tool of indoctrination than an actual resource, and at some point during my escalating acts of spiritual rebellion, the damn thing had started to complain to me incessantly.
It was less than pleased with how little I was doing to ‘enrich’ myself with the available learning materials, by then.
Worse, it kept trying to sell me shit. All the time.
Whenever I had a spare moment, it would serve pop ups for entertainment products, overpriced software tools, and a million other pieces of corporate garbage.
Which admittedly made a fair amount of sense to me, once I actually bothered to think about it. The rewards for the quizzes were essentially just company script, after all, and if they could get me to waste it on their own overpriced drivel, then so much the better, right?
Combine that with the fact that my captors actually claimed that I owed them a near impossibly large fiscal debt, and you quickly got a picture for the sort of rat race that was being run here.
The exact same sort of scam that was regularly pulled on oil rigs, company towns, and anywhere else a corporation could get their employees isolated and away from the eyes of the law.
I didn’t want any part of it.
So I got rid of it.
After I surgically analyzed every piece of it I could, of course.
I was stupid, not dumb.
I knew that I needed to at least check for what pieces of surveillance the overgrown LLM had aimed at me, and then I needed to be able to spoof that shit before its absence became a problem.
What I found in that regard was actually concerningly little.
It almost looked like… I wasn’t actually being kept track of all that well?
All I could find was a few incredibly simple monitoring tools that simply tracked where I was in real space, how much time I was spending in various menus, and whether or not I’d illegally accessed certain very specific sub-systems.
And I couldn’t really figure out why that was. If I were the evil asshole in charge here, I’d want to make damn sure my slaves were keeping themselves behaved.
Admittedly, they had the most important angle covered, at least. Fabrication, power, and communications were all completely off limits.
But still!
I could do so much to sabotage the designs of my captors already. Things like disabling and then taking over every one of the few surveillance systems I’d already found, for instance.
Which meant, theoretically, I could eventually turn this ship around.
I just had no intention of doing so. Not yet.
I smelled a trap.
I was far from any sort of preternaturally gifted expert in subverting security systems.
I was, frankly speaking, a rank amateur.
That I’d gotten as far as I had already was actually something of a minor miracle, considering how all the learning materials that I had access to tried their absolute best to avoid the mention of anything even remotely similar to hacking, whether that was doing it yourself or protecting against it.
The closest they got was passingly mentioning encryption, and even then, only in the context of buying a prebuilt, government approved security suites.
They very much did not want me to learn how to do what I was currently doing.
Which sort of implied that I was actually on the right track, no?
Still… It felt just a little bit too easy.
So for now, I was continuing to make small quality of life improvements, and doing as much reconnaissance as I could with the tools I had available.
The parts of the ship that really did anything fun were all off limits, yes, but everything around them was fair game.
Even if I couldn’t get direct access to anything, I could still sniff a little bit of whatever was passed back and forth between various systems.
Not everything, but, hopefully, enough.
For now though, I waited, I watched, and I worked on synthesizing what I’d learned of engineering to figure out how to make a bipedal robot that did something other than just shoot people.
Many potential designs for a humanoid RC drone later, and with much poking and prodding at my prison’s virtual walls, I finally got what I needed.
A little blip, intercepted, sniffed, and sent right back along its way with nobody the wiser.
It was a tiny little thing, that handshake. A minuscule amount of data, received from somewhere outside the vessel, and briefly stored into ram before being used for authentication only a thousandth of a second later.
And it was my way into the ship's Antenna.
Or rather, it was my way of cracking into the ship's antenna without setting off any potential alarms.
And once I had the communications locked down, I could do anything I damn well pleased for the next two years.
It was time for a jailbreak, baybeeee!
About five minutes into exploring my new toys, having shut down comms with no trouble at all, I found a bomb.
And I’m being literal, when I say that. Packed tightly into the center of the fabrications bay was an absolutely absurd amount of explosives.
Enough to vaporize the whole ship seventeen times over.
All chemically activated, and rigged to what was essentially a spring fed dead man’s switch, and completely isolated from any of the ship’s electronics.
It was so dumb that it all actually kind of wrapped right back around to being smart.
You see, the bomb was set to go off when a single little striker spring lost tension. A spring very delicately hooked onto a shallowly angled hook suspended from the ceiling.
And if it so much as got jostled the wrong way, I’d be gone.
If I opened the door to fabrications, a cord would be pulled, which would slip the spring, and I’d be gone.
If I tried to access the fabrications bay remotely, a robotic arm would automatically twitch to life as part of its boot cycle, tapping the spring, and then I’d be gone.
If something hit the side of the ship, I’d be gone.
If I made a crash landing, I’d be gone.
And so on it went.
The only way to disarm the bomb that I could find, was via a pressure switch that was mechanically joined to one of the ship’s landing struts.
If that landing strut was pushed down with the right amount of force, and then held there, a plate would swing into place between the striker spring and the touch sensitive primer the striker spring was aimed at.
This acted as a safety, essentially.
And once it was engaged, disarming the rest of it would be trivially easy.
Though it should be noted that the only reason I didn’t blow myself to kingdom come right away was because I’d had a last minute surge of paranoia, and chosen to gain access to the modest on board CCTV network before anything else.
That let me get a pair of eyes on the bomb, but the rest I had to figure out by rooting through the small amount of dedicated storage that was attached to the comms array.
Where I found a locally stored landing checklist that was set to append itself to the first message I received from a certain address.
That checklist had, as its first step, directions for disarming the bomb.
Directions that, so far as I could tell, I couldn’t even begin to follow without a single goddamn landing strut being pushed into the dirt.
A seemingly impossible task, while floating in the vacuum of space.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve that problem.
But it just didn’t seem possible to work around, from where I was sitting, on my still invisible couch.
None of the electronics I could manipulate would help me here. And I couldn’t physically get access to the fabrications bay myself for a number of reasons, not least of which being that Istill didn’t have a physical body.
And I couldn’t build myself a physical body of any sort, whether that be a simple little drone on wheels, a quadcopter, or a full blown gynoid to live inside of, without using the fabricators.
And I couldn't use the fabricators without setting off the bomb.
I was screwed.
Well and truly.
Unless…
Weren’t the landing structs electronically activated?
Well, yes, they were, but I couldn’t retract them any farther than their default positions. Otherwise I’d just have them retract hard enough to press that switch for me.
But, I could still deploy them.
And then retract them.
And then deploy them again.
All on alternating sides, in rapid sequence, set to cause the hull of the ship to flex slightly as an equal and opposite reaction to the relatively minuscule forces of a couple of servos pushing themselves open and shut repeatedly.
Which might not sound like much, until you factor in the fact that if I did that at just the right frequency, I could cause the whole setup to oscillate with ever more force on each cycle.
Just like if you were on a set of playground swings, kicking your legs to reach a little higher, every time you went up and down.
So, theoretically, if I built up enough force, I could cause one of the landing struts to rebound back up hard enough that it activated the pressure switch, if only for a moment.
Assuming I didn’t rattle the dead man’s switch so badly that it all went boom, before then.
It was an incredibly dumb work around, but that was part of why I liked it.
The very thought of managing to defeat my captors with something so idiotic made me cackle madly.
As did the thought of blowing myself up by just mashing two buttons over and over again the wrong way.
I’d be using the firmament of the ship itself to store kinetic energy, flexing outer plating and structural supports alike as makeshift springs, all the while hoping against hope that I didn’t shake the wrong thing loose.
It was so, so fucking stupid. How could I not laugh?
I was literally rolling on the floor, kicking my legs and slamming one arm against the ground as my avatar was racked with violently mirthful spasms, breathless as my digital lungs convulsed emptily from several minutes straight of manic chortling.
It was ugly, painful, and euphoric all at once.
I needed it desperately.