Trained Chimp
Captain Waymire Ping-Jackson sighed with frustration and then resumed banging on the stim dispenser until, at long last, a thin stream of lukewarm tan liquid began to trickle into his battered polycarbonate mug.
Everything about being onboard the ship made it clear just how much SWE held its human employees in contempt, from the rust on the pellet dispenser to the endlessly flickering lights in three of the aft hallways.
Heck, even his bunk had popped a bolt and was only hanging onto the bulkhead by a wing and a prayer, which made getting a good night's rest an adventure unto itself, but Waymire was damned if he was going to sleep on the floor where the tidybots could get him.
Of course, in this modern day and age, it made perfect sense for the corporation to have everything important performed by AIs, and the cold room that functioned as the brains of the real masters of the ship had its own army of maintenance robots.
It was only the human areas that were an afterthought to the corporation as his presence was only to satisfy some minor clause in an insurance agreement, a flesh-and-blood backup in case the umpteen layers of AI somehow all managed to fail at once.
Yet there he was, saddled with the antiquated title of captain as if he even had the power to deactivate the engines or change course.
No, the only thing he was captaining was straddling the thin edge between boredom and despair as he hurtled through space on a nine-month journey to the Chiba asteroid belt.
His job, if one could even call it that, was a joke, one that could probably be performed equally well by a chimpanzee.
This reminded Waymire that there was a rumor that SWE had tried to train chimpanzees to make the ore run to Jupiter. But after a week of having nothing to do but verify that a panel of lights were still blinking in the right order, they'd rebelled and started smearing shit on the control panels.
And so, the corporation was still stuck with using humans to do the last remaining jobs too crappy for AIs to handle.
Literally, the only thing earning him a berth on the Nicolau 3dRK9 Heavy Transport and Ore Processor was the fact that he was invulnerable to electrical system malfunctions.
Nonetheless, in an effort to keep his sanity, Waymire faithfully went through his daily duties of inspecting the control panel, making a check mark, on the simpaper with a genuine old-fashioned graphite 'cil, walking the full length of corridors on the upper deck to inspect for any leaks, and then finishing by fixing himself a bowl of pellets to eat while he stared at the collision warning scanner until his eyes started to glaze over.
Thankfully, since it was a Strachan World Entertainment vessel, the d-bank had plenty of e'dramas to watch, some of them even fairly recently made.
The d-bank also had a few 'tutes as well, and based on a recommendation from one of the guys in his pod back at the Boronosov-Huang Colony, Waymire had started incorporating a workout into his daily routine, using the overhead hydraulics grate to do pull-ups and a spare mattpad he'd found in a maintenance closet to do some stretches.
Still, though, it was a daily challenge for Waymire to try and keep himself from going crazy.
With ninety-nine percent of the ship being off-limits, he felt simultaneously both claustrophobic and also terrified that somehow, he was going to be crushed under the weight of the colossal equipment that was able to process 90 gigatons of raw ore on the return trip.
That's why Waymire always scrolled through the menu until he found an e-drama that had a lot of outdoor scenes, so at least for a few moments, he could pretend that he wasn't a tiny insect trapped in a 22nd-century bottle zipping through the solar system at 50 kilometers per microsecond.
After being aboard the Heavy Nick for three weeks, Waymire had searched through the 'bank to see if he could find a tute to teach him how to read stillbet, but the truth was that he had breathed a sigh of relief when no results came up.
On the rare occasion when he'd seen stillbet letters engraved on certain signage in some of the older parts of the colony made his heart race, staring back at him with their icy demeanor and refusal to transform into intelligible images.
Anyway, Waymire knew that the rollscroll system was easier and better suited for a man of his limited intellect, and so he abandoned all desire to learn how to read and thus pass the time that way.
And so, time crawled by, one endless second at a time, and the journey to Chiba would've probably ended up with him able to quote every line from his favorite e'drama had he not accidentally stumbled onto a secret door one day during his daily rounds, and that had only occurred because one of the buttons from his front chest pocket of his coveralls had fallen off, and Waymire had bent over to pick it up.
It was out of the corner of his eye that he saw a glint of metal deep in a space where there should've been nothing but pipes carrying pressurized hydraulic fluid.
Yet his mind had grown so dull that he'd almost walked on, only the last dying spark of curiosity remaining in his brain prompting him to investigate further.
Waymire had to contort his body to squeeze past the two big pipes that ran down the length of that particular section of corridor, but when he managed to get through, he saw that there was a tall, narrow metal door set in the wall that shouldn't have been there.
At least, it hadn't been brought up on any of the training vids the company had made him watch. Yet it was there, and it was definitely a door with a handle and everything, clearly designed for human use and not a maintenance droid.
For a long time, Waymire stood in front of the door and stared at it. There wasn't any kind of code box or facescanner that he could see, making him wonder exactly how a person was supposed to open it.
Waymire checked all around the thin frame of the door, looking for a button to activate the rollscroll instructions, but there was nothing but flat metal.
Truly, it was a conundrum, a mysterious door located in a place where no person had any business being and without any obvious way to open it.
Waymire knew that some of the Heavy Nicks had been built back before everything had been completely automated by AIs, so maybe the door was a holdover from that ancient era when the human crews had actually been needed.
But surely, during the retrofit, such archaic features would've been removed, if only to prevent illiterate monkeys like himself from getting inside and screwing up something important.
It was only when he was about to give up and head back to his pod for his morning bowl of pellets that he decided to try one last thing, which was to reach out and touch the handle.
And to his immense surprise, it turned easily, allowing him to open the door, the dust-clotted hinges squealing in protest.
As shocked as Waymire was that he'd gotten the door open, it was what he saw inside that completely changed everything.
