The Engineer

This morning, I thought I had picked the best engineer to compensate for the worst pilot. Once again, I am fail.

I hadn’t met my engineer face-to-face before, I’d just interviewed him over the allapp. His name’s Hogarth Olenick, and he seemed like any other dweek. He could sit and talk at your forever, and even when he stammered and stuttered and stumbled on his tounge, he still kept right on talking through it. He also seemed to know what he was talking about, and some other “engineers” I’d interviewed earlier couldn’t even use the words “hull integrity” right. I thought he’d be great. Maybe a bad conversationalist, but he could still fix my ship when it broke.

It was the goggles. People look smarter when they wear goggles. They also look taller over the allapp. Or should I say, older.

He’s nine.

Fourteen would’ve been okay. Twelve would’ve been pushing it. But nine? Bleeping nine?

Zeux was not happy either. I checked the kid’s allapp for a parental permissions slip, which he had, but she said we couldn’t “keep” him. He was too young to be travelling in space with two strangers, “especially a cyborg,” as she put it. Part of me agreed, but I had to think about UniversePress. I have to post my first article on interstellar space travel by next Friday, and I wouldn’t be able to write anything if I didn’t travel through space.

That, and he’s not a normal kid. Maybe he shouldn’t be treated like one. He’s not a grown kid, either, he’s a natural. He has this ugly birthmark over his eye to prove it. I knew naturals sometimes came out looking weird or with mental problems like ADHD or whatev, but I never thought they could come out smarter than… well, me.

So now, he’s on the ship, playing annoyingly loud video games on his allapp. He hasn’t been much of a conversationalist at all, so far. I don’t blame him. Now that I think about it, he probably only saw me from the neck up over the allapp. Maybe he was as shocked to see me and my arm as I was to see him and his age. At least he isn’t being a Zeux about it.

Speaking of, Zeux got us out of the Milky Way okay, but now that we’re on autopilot, she can’t stop rambling nonsense about how everything I do is wrong. I turn the volume up on my allapp, she rambles. I drink one can of light liquor, she rambles. I enable the five secs rule when I drop an applestix, she rambles. She acts like the boss of me just because she’s flying the ship and I’m not. Pilots get possessive like that. She’ll get over it. I hope.

I should be more annoyed than I am, after everything that happened today, but I’m just glad to be out here. We just jumped out of hyperspace a while ago. We were in there for hours. I’d never been in hyperspace before. I was staring out the bridge view pretty much the whole time. I literally sat on the floor and watched the stars fly by. It was like a meteor shower, but faster, never ending. I could see other galaxies drifting by us, as if they were moving instead of us. I sat there so long, my allapp powered off. I never ignore my allapp long enough for that to happen.

All in all, it’s going pretty well. I just need to get my engineer to start talking to me and my pilot to shut it.