Hyperdrive Issues
MOTE Week 47, 2025
This week on MOTE, I was prompted by Fiona Grey: “I thought you said this thing worked.”
—
Fred pulled the lever for the hyperdrive, and nothing happened. “I thought you said this thing worked.”
George sighed. “It does work. It’s just very fiddly, and insists on you doing things in all the wrong order.”
George reset the lever, did a few things on the console, and then pulled the lever. With a whooshing sound, the blackness of space was replaced by the white flashing lights of a hyperspace tube. “See! It works.”
“How on Mars did you figure that out?”
“A lot of trial and error, and a lot of tracking the connections. This shuttle has been put together using parts from four different manufacturers, all of whom design their kit so that it can’t be used with anyone else’s. Everything works, but the connections are inevitably highly non-standard, and cause problems all over the place.”
“So that’s why when you put the job advert together, you said you wanted anyone to have experience of working with multiple systems.”
“Oh yes.” George nodded his head. “If you expect any of the systems on this ship to be a standard, one method works for all, thing, you won’t be able to get it to work. I’ll teach you how to do things, and the rest of the crew will too, once you get to know them, but for now, assume that the way you were taught to do it probably won’t work for anything on this cobbled-together thing.”
“Right. So it’ll take me a long time to become competent at navigating this thing.”
“Yes. But the real reason I chose you over all the other candidates is that you have experience in maintaining the systems. With the jury-rigging that went on in this ship, that is essential. When systems go down, it’s all hands on deck to fix them, because the standard solution probably won’t work.”
George got up. “Now. It’ll take us about a day to reach Alpha Centauri. I’ve got plenty of time to introduce you to the rest of the crew, and then we can look into where you slot into the maintenance roster.”
—
My prompt this week went to Parrish Baker, who produced a pleasant work of fiction. I’m looking forwards to reading what everyone else comes up with.