12 - Manual Knowledge

Exiting the ship turned out to be fairly easy. The language module that Nanaseto had installed came in handy as she read the directions printed on the walls and checked them against her Map. It took an hour of back tracking and moving debris, but Maya found the giant hole and exited the ship.

The cracked rainbow skies were a welcomed sight, albeit a bit terrifying. She breathed in the stale air and sighed. The truck stood where she had left it, untouched. It would have sucked if it turned out her ship was in a bad neighborhood.

She chuckled as she opened the back of the truck and rummaged through a bin of stuff her father kept.

Pops had run a couple of promotions to get the name of his business out, one of them was creating swag. A few T-shirts had been printed with the Sullivan’s Comfort Foods logo and were stored in a cardboard box. Maya made a skirt from two aprons, not out of modesty’s sake, but she didn’t like the feel of her bare ass hanging in the wind. Shoes turned out to be a problem, as there were none. Maya looked at the ship and all the metal in it. She wasn’t too keen of walking barefoot around all that pitted and corroded metal.

Was tetanus a thing here?

There was no helping it, though. Maybe some shoes had survived the twenty thousand years since the ship had crashed.

“Only about twenty four hours late to the job,” Maya told herself as she prepped the small kitchen to cook a meal. Hunger still gnawed at her and as Pops used to say, the best time to think was on a full belly.

Lunch was a meal of grilled cheese and tomato soup, followed by a single serve cup of chocolate ice cream, and a cola. Maya set up a folding chair and a small table beside the truck. She ate her meal while watching the ship.

Survival was the goal. The situation currently seemed bleak, but Maya understood that she had to work the problem. If she didn’t, then she’d die. It was simple.

“First things first,” she said.

She opened her Inventory and spotted the square with a black cube icon. She willed one of the cubes into the palm of her hand and stared at it for a moment, reading the printed words on it.

Knowledge Module - Low grade, Tier 1

Markozki 44B Scanpod Maintenance Manual 7822-VB

Troubleshoot, maintain, repair

Requirements: Mental Channel: 1, Mental Recovery: 1

Usage: 1

Maya took a breath. “Activate!”

The knowledge module glowed for a brief moment and then melted into her skin. She stared in shock. She immediately rubbed her palm, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

“Weird.”

Knowledge Module - Low grade, Tier 1

Markozki 44B Scanpod Maintenance Manual 7822-VB

Installing…

Estimated Time: 4 hrs

“Okay…” Maya blinked. With a sigh, Maya swiped away the popup. Nanaseto had said it would download into her brain, but she had assumed instantaneously. Not over the course of four hours. “Next time, go for useful things.”

She pulled out another cube and decided to test if she could absorb another.

“Activate!” she cried out again. Nothing happened. “Well, I suppose that would be cheating.”

***

“If we demo this wall, we can open this space up. That way when we have guests over, they won’t be tripping on jagged pieces of space metal,” Maya announced in a fictitious happy voice as she pulled crumpled metal and broken beams from the hole in the deck. She began cursing as she felt sharp metal digging into her feet.

“Commercial break!” she shouted and sat down, breathing heavily. Increased Physical stats or not, she was exhausted. It had been hours since she began removing the debris blocking the corridor and she had barely made a dent into it. One good thing, though, was that whatever material the space ship was made from, most of it was fairly light. “Magitanium?”

“Next time,” Maya said, taking a swig of water. “Don’t go for rustic old timey space ships, salvage a newer model. Preferably with a crew of robots willing and able to do the heavy lifting.”

The puttering of the generator drew her attention. The red machine was the only reason she had been able to work in the dark interior of the ship. With the flashlight dead, she had no light source. There was the flashlight on her phone, but the escape from the ship had drained its battery.

Pops was a man who planned for everything and Maya hoped she would one day be on his level of preparedness. Along with the generator came a full two gallon gasoline can, a hundred foot extension cord, and a work light.

The boost to her Physical attributes came in handy as she lugged the sixty pound generator single handedly to the ship. It was heavy, yes, but it wasn’t the struggle she usually endured moving the thing.

With the generator only powering a single LED work light and recharging her phone, Maya estimated that it would last a lot longer than running the appliances and refrigerators on the truck. She wasn’t entirely sure how long, but perhaps long enough for her to loot some of the more important parts of the ship.

There was a muted ding and a blinking light appeared at the corner of her vision. Maya brought up the System message.

Knowledge Module - Low grade, Tier 1

Markozki 44B Scanpod Maintenance Manual 7822-VB

Install completed

She sat there and waited, but nothing occurred. There was no sudden influx of information, no expansion of her mind, or realizing the importance of making sure the use Markozki brand cleaning lasers after usage upon a high tier mage class individual. The Mk 2.5 BS89 low grade, Tier 1 component modules were sensitive to the mana draw from high grade, Tier 1 mages.

Maya paused and let out a laugh.

Information arrived in the same manner as if she had read the book and was now simply remembering what it had said. Like the formula for compound interest she had learned, the knowledge bubbled up when she thought about it.

The scanpod was a device used to help stabilized mana channels in injured SIL. If one were in a fight and badly hurt, or had overdrawn mana, the scanpod’s function was to locate the damage and with other machines help in healing the injury.

“Cool, what else can I learn?” she wondered pulling out more knowledge cubes. She sorted them by topic and then as she managed to dig into the information a little more, by how long it would take to download.

***

Over the course of two days Maya managed to download half of the knowledge modules into her noggin. She, at first, had been leaning more toward the illegal knowledge sets found in the doctor’s office, but the more she thought on what had been downloaded, she felt she needed the manuals first.

Learning about a Lasawqin Blood Enhancer or the Harran Cellular Essence Expander didn’t add to her knowledge about how to go about fixing the ship; but as she learned more about the equipment used and what it entailed to maintain them; Maya began to piece together how the technology these aliens used work.

It was modular technology, she realized. As she did physical work removing debris, she also mentally dug through the knowledge about various components and parts that were needed to be replaced, checked, or fixed. The manuals gave a comprehensive list of part numbers and equipment, and as the second manual downloaded into her head, she began comparing the parts that she had come across.

The alien technology came in modular components, as with everything in the System they came in grades and tiers. Most technology seemed to be made of low grade, Tier 1 components. The science behind the technology was way beyond anything she could understand and it seemed to be the same for the run of the mill maintenance techicains tasked with fixing machines.

Therefore the technology was simplified to component racks that just needed to be replaced and tossed. Like any good proprietary technology driven Earth corporation, the various alien corporations also didn’t like people knowing what lay within their machines. Therefore it was highly illegal to dismantle propriety component racks, which boiled everything down to plug and play.

Maya visualized them as Lego pieces. Connect one component to another and they’d snap together. Toss in a little mana and see what happens. There were millions of various components and an unimaginable number of combinations that were used to create all the mana driven machinery around her.

After clearing the debris from the corridor, Maya had made her way into the medical room again. There she used her maintenance knowledge to dismantle one of the lesser machines, a Markozki Lateral Infuser, that was only used on semi-organic space faring lifeforms. There was a lot of machines in the medical room that she hadn’t fully realized, a few of them were recessed into the walls or built into the walls.

It took Maya an entire day to dismantle the Infuser and crack open the component racks. She could identify components in her head, but she had never seen any of them. Therefore, she sacrificed the Infuser for her curiosity.

Scores of fingernail sized translucent crystals lay within a delicate latticework of fine wires and gauzy webbing. Maya realized what she was looking at was way above her knowledge base. She was a cavewoman staring at an iPhone.

“Pretty,” Maya finally said.

A memory bubbled up in her head about the time her middle brother had dismantled a radio to figure out how it worked. He had broken apart the circuit boards and peeled open the capacitors and resistors, trying to see what was inside of them. She remembered the look of confusion as he sat with broken pieces of the radio laying around him. He had destroyed a machine and still didn’t understand anything about it.

Maya sighed and lay down in the semi darkness of the medical room. She pushed down the surge of homesickness and worry, they did her no good.

Back home, she knew, there was an apocalypse going on. It was a simple conclusion to come to once she thought on it. The world had been upgraded from Tier 1 to Tier 2 due to the Point of Contact thing, she still didn’t have any clue as to what that was. The last two days of her head being filled with alien knowledge, albeit maintenance manuals, had caused her to ponder on the whole Tier system.

The shady doctor of the ship was Tier 2 and Nanaseto was high grade, Tier 1, with the ability to regrow organs and patch up her genetic structure. The higher the grade and the Tier meant the better the object was, that was her understanding. But even within the grade itself, there were variances, so two low grade, Tier 1 objects were not the same.

As everything was graded and tiered, it only made sense that a higher tier was something else altogether. Nanaseto said that AIs gained sentience when they got to Tier 2, which meant a massive jump from either programmed or animal like behavior. Even the Rogue AI she had defeated was only low grade, Tier 1.

If a rogue AI could gain sentience from going to another Tier, how much powerful was the shady doctor then? If going from Tier 1 to Tier 2 entailed a massive change, then what else would be happening on Earth besides an apocalypse.

“Local wildlife, weather, and geography might be disrupted.” Maya murmured to herself. She had seen what mana could do to a simple maintenance robot and she knew what it could do to biological lifeforms. If that was happening all over Earth, they were in for a brutal time.

Maya cursed and sat up. She was burning daylight, or in this case generator fuel. She glanced at the work light, it shone brightly in the room and from the opened door she could hear the puttering of the generator.

Already she had burned through half of the fuel. Two days inside the ship and she had only another day of work left. She didn’t know what she would do once the generator ran out of fuel, but she knew she had to find something to get her back on the path of getting Nanaseto online.

She pulled all the component racks of the Infuser into her Inventory and stood up. The light outside of the ship wasn’t bright, but she didn’t need the generator to be able to see out there.

***

On the afternoon of day five, the generator finally ran out of fuel. Maya had been anticipating the event and when it came, she was sadden as it marked the end of her exploration of the ship.

She had not been idle in the two days since she had dismantled the Infuser. Knowing she had limited fuel and time, Maya had focused her search for open rooms in the ship. She had trekked most of the ship, even briefly dipping into the mana suffused engineering sections to pillage rooms of everything.

With her increased strength and stamina she had built a sled from junk and hauled her generator and work light around with her, also piling all the goods she found from the ship into it.

Then she dumped them outside of the hole in the ship and went back for more. The storage room where she had killed the spider guards had been emptied of all its contents, including the spider guard bodies.

She didn’t sort what she grabbed, instead opting to wait until she stripped everything she could carry out. So anything and everything she threw into her sled and hauled away.

It all came down to power in the end.

She needed power to run her lights. She needed power to get Nanaseto online. She needed power to get any of the doors opened. And she had none. The generator died and her pillaging came to an end.

The unshielded mana core was a source of power, but until she had some protection from it, she wasn’t going to head back into that area of the ship. The closest she’d gotten was heading back to the storage room. Even the blue light creeped her out now.

The vast majority of the ship was inaccessible to her. Having salvage rights didn’t mean jack when she couldn’t even open the doors. She had only found three crew quarters that were open and what looked to be a security room, with monitors and a single swivel chair. Every door was locked to her. Brute force and begging definitely didn’t help in that regard.

So at the end of day five, Maya sat in the blue light of the world and listlessly picked through the piles of items she had taken from the ship. She set out her table and chair and sorted the items.

Most of the stuff from the storage room were incomprehensible scientific equipment. Even being able to read the labels meant nothing as Maya couldn’t understand what they were used for. That went into the Too Complicated pile. The items she had found from the crew quarters were better. They consisted of mostly entertainment modules and what she assumed were personal computers.

But as with everything, they had no power.

The biggest discovery was from the security room she had looted. There had been boxes of what she called Contraband, random items that were stored away. She hadn’t really looked into the boxes when she took them, but as she picked through the items Maya discovered half a dozen new knowledge modules. Three of them were maintenance manuals for equipment, but three of them were rarer Ability manuals.

Maintenance - unskilled Level 1 - low grade, Tier 1

Maintenance - unskilled Level 2 - low grade, Tier 1

Weapons - Non-lethal - unskilled Level 1 - low grade, Tier 1

One thing Maya had learned from the manuals was that knowledge lead to Abilities. One could gain an Ability by trial and error, but they could also gain an Ability if they had the knowledge.

The System, from what Maya was understanding, didn’t know what was in one’s head. It only saw what one did, then it awarded them Abilities accordingly. But along with Abilities came knowledge; just as the knowledge modules downloaded into her head, the System downloaded bits of knowledge into her head. The System knowledge was an instinctual kind of knowledge. With high enough levels in an Ability, she didn’t need to have a knowledge base but would instinctively know what to do.

Maya had come to rely on some of her Abilities as she looted the ship. She had the [Looter], [Looter of the Dead], and [Tomb Raider] Abilities, all of which helped her with spotting valuable items in her march across the ship. She hadn’t known they were effecting her until she thought about it and realized every time she bypassed something of worth, she’d get a feeling. Eventually that feeling would guide her to some small bit of valuables that had been either tucked away or she’d overlooked.

She had a small pile of what she called her Treasure Heap. It consisted of jewelry, entertainment modules, and Citizen Chips, both legal and illegal. Her Abilities told her they were valuable, but she didn’t know what to do with them, therefore she had separated them into their own pile.

Maya yawned and glanced up at the sky, watching as the slowly swirling colors merged and separated, occasionally one of the still terrifying cracks appeared and then vanished.

The haul from the ship was so-so, Maya realized. She had been hoping for something more concrete or game changing. She hadn’t even been able to reach the mana batteries that had powered Nanaseto. They were locked away in another room she had no access to. She had found some knowledge modules but that didn’t mean much of anything. She could trouble shoot some alien medical devices, but other than that, she didn’t know how to build anything.

She couldn’t even open the doors.

Now she was out of power. She could technically hook up the work light to the food truck, but she knew that it wouldn’t even last a day. The diesel in the food truck was her only fuel left and she needed that to get around this place. Not that she had anywhere else to go.

Her eye moved toward the piles of junk around the ship. She could see corroding metal and trash, but as she thought about it, maybe what she thought of trash was actually gold.

Anything above the ship had arrived later than the ship itself. It was a stratum of oldest at the bottom and newer up top. So maybe if she climbed to the top of the pile, she’d find something new up there. Something that hadn’t yet used up all its mana juice if it were technological or wasn’t an old corroded piece of junk.

Maya stared at the trash pile and made her decision.

***

[Looter of the Dead] Level 2

Rest in Peace, unless you have valuables. You’ve taken a high value item from the dead.

(Bonus Attribute Points only given at level 1, 10, 20…)

[Laborer] Level 1

Everyone has to start somewhere.

+ 1 to Stamina