Arrival

I awoke out of sleep mode at my destination or sort of I had arrived in system at least but it would take months before I got close enough to start processing ore out of the relatively close asteroid belt so I began cobbling together my magnetic drag net once more as my plasma drives had burned out their coils and died the final death. I collected a great number of things some was little more than bits of unprocessed asteroid but there were a couple pieces that obviously were processed metal though severely warped and burned possibly from an explosion in the distant past. I kept collecting the various bits of material I could and soon had a decent stock pile of materials maybe a ton of iron and double that of quartz a quarter ton of silver and maybe a half ton of cobalt and surprisingly two tons of titanium dioxide. I processed my materials into easy to process bricks and began construction on my starship I unfortunately didn't have the tools to try my hand at alloys much but I had plenty of time and so the skeleton of what would become my intergalactic starship began to form. I used a hexagonal cell system to create the framework for the rest of my work the first was a copy of the navigational computer out of my current subpar transport though I added more capacity each part required such finite precision and timing that I was completely in aware of my surroundings. After a month of putting together my starship I had used up most of my resources I had even managed to build a shielded computer core though I didn't have a operating system as yet still I managed to construct a faraday cage and a thin shell made of what little gold I had bonded to a layer of cobalt and titanium each only a thin layer but better than nothing I even installed a permanently places version of my magnetic net system though I didn't have the parts to assemble a new set of plasma drives I did have just enough to build a new ion drive though no fuel for it as of yet and certainly not enough for any kind of power source.

My ship was maybe 2% complete and it already dwarfed my current vessel and then I realized I had arrived at the asteroid field. It was quite dense and then I noticed that it wasn't asteroids but ships and parts of ships hundreds maybe thousands of them and I started scanning for a more intact ship to explore. I found a dreadnought sized ship on the edge of the field that seemed mostly intact so I prodded my little droid transport to its location which took a couple hours but when I arrived I was stunned.

The ship was massive closer to the size of a moon than a dreadnought and it was spherical aside from a couple massive holes blasted into it the ship was completely intact so I did the logical thing and immediately boarded it. Ok it wasn't so logical but greedy and who could blame me a intact alien spacecraft for me to explore oh I was as giddy as a school kid on break. As soon as I entered the ship I was impressed by the alien architecture everything was exactly the same size and obviously designed for beings around 2 meters tall give or take so about human size and everything had a odd green sheen to it. As I explored my systems kept recording everything and trying to place it in the proper place so I learned what various parts seemed to be even the odd green alloy that I was walking on each corridor offered new information to my questing sensors.

There are times when being a mind in a robot is a good thing because every bit of data I collected I can now access any time I want and with perfect recall even things I didn't know or couldn't have known were there. During my exploration of the derelict ship I encountered numerous technologies that had no analog to any my systems had ever encountered some I managed to figure out by extrapolation other's remained a mystery. It was quite by accident that I stumbled upon a computer access node and realized what it was so I tried to connect to the systems of the ship my power core just enough to wake the dormant computers aboard the ship and allow me to access them not that I understood what I was seeing as everything was in a foreign language and programming code.

Hours spent connected netted me a basic understanding of their language and at about that time I realized that the ships computer system was actually trying to facilitate translation as suddenly the screen started flickering through a series of pictograms with alien words overlaid. Yeah it was fast 30 seconds in and it had showed something like three thousand different images which my systems dutifully recorded and this lasted a few hours as my core cpu temp started to overheat. I was essentially being force fed an entire education in a couple hours not a pleasant experience but afterwards I could read the systems messages and comprehend what I was seeing. I was bombarded with system messages and data from the ship and my own systems it was an experience to say the least.

Once my new education was dumped into my databanks I I knew that the ships ai was intact and wanted my assistance because the very first thing that popped up was quite literally "I request your assistance" followed by hundreds of pop ups that showed what needed repair and or replacement. I can admit that I'm glad my systems were hard wired in because otherwise I'm sure the ships ai might have tried to digitally erase me and take over my body kind of like having ghosts fight over the same host to possess. Once I was completely disconnected from the ships systems I stood there a few minutes processing the data and the experience and decided that helping the ship out was not in my best interests.