It has been a week since I was in the ARC Drive chamber. I activated the remote monitoring that was there, but not turned on. Now I have that much more access to the ship and it's systems. I've done my due diligence, checked all the code. No hidden messages. No tricks in the code. Nothing. I've stared at it for a full day, trying to come up with what to say in this entry.
I understand a bit more now. Never got far into the ARC Drive chamber. There is a control area that kinda sticks out over things. Cannot see the walls I know are there, black in ways I don't get. They absorb light as if they were not even there. Almost sucking it in.
It might look like water in the picture. It is not. I'm not sure what it is, nor do the sensor systems I focused on it, and I cannot take a sample. It is as if it moves away when I try to lower something into it, and then if I get something low enough, it closes over it and is as if it cuts off the cable. Cuts, cleanly, and at the molecular level, braided carbon nano-tube fiber cables. The ARC Drive is something different I knew, but I had no idea. Neither did the techs. That much is now all too clear.
There was a message for me, not hidden or anything. It played immediately upon me activating the controls there in that compartment. The ARC Drive looks like an alien thing, but it isn't. It is the creation of some Tech that everyone thought dead. Turns out he wasn't, not until recently. He had hidden away from the world to work on something. Many things actually. The Viteză Furie is what he built. That is why it is so different from anything else. It was his creation, his gift to the world. I know this, because he told me in the message.
The Techs never found the ARC drive chamber, or didn't look for it. Maybe they assumed it was an update to the existing drive system, which I have one of in each compartment. Maybe they thought the multiple drives were working on concert. I don't know. The system worked, so they just went with it, hoping to understand it and therefore his writings. At least that is what I can conclude since the ARC drive chamber was never accessed before me. Now I now have access to all his writings and more. So many things have opened up now. Data stores I didn't even know were there. All now duplicated over to the other systems.
He didn't tell me how it works in his message, only that he figured something out, and built the Viteză Furie based on that. Really, the message was a rambling mash of words. Had to play it three times, just to get some information out of it. Still. It answers so much, and yet, leaves me with so many new questions. Why did the Techs and the government decide to train me to use the ship, and everything about it? Why me? Why didn't they tear it apart down to the individual screw and bolt so they could understand and duplicate it? Damn I wish the ET/EC was working so I could ask.
Speaking of the ET/EC comms, it is sooo broken. I'm actually rather relieved, but it is going to take months for the components I need to print. I've had to take the schematics and program the print program myself, and I'm only a few hundred lines into something that is going to take thousands of lines of code. Why? Because for reasons I will never understand, with everything they included, everything they left me in the data-banks of the Viteză Furie. The games and programs that are installed. They didn't install a simple GUI interface for programming and creating new printer designs. So I have to code one myself, test it, update it, test it again. It is going to take months to print, because it is going to take me months to build the program that will let me upload the scans of the broken components. Once I have that, I can modify the scan images, already working on that actually, and print the replacement parts.
The broken part was very subtle. One of the control boards has some micro-fissures in some circuit pathways. Small enough that just basic testing didn't see them, because when testing, it is just confirming things have connectivity. It was the maintenance run that found it, by accident, and even then, it didn't know what it was, only noting an intermittent failure of the board, or rather, boards, in question. The maintenance cycle didn't know what to make of it, as it only happened during heavy load, like what would happen whenever it would come up to try and send or receive. Thus why the carrier signal worked, but I couldn't send or receive anything. When the circuit was put under more loan than just being there, such as the simple testing never warmed it up. Only under the load from the maintenance run did it warm up, and that cause the micro-fissures to open up and break connectivity.
Given what happened with the ET/EC, I have a system by system, module by module component scan going, looking for other instances. Given that I may be out here for the rest of my life, I'd like to not have another system fail on me when I really need it. Also going to start printing spare parts, at least for critical pieces and control boards.
Still watching the ARC drive on the now active monitors. I just don't know what it is. It changes and moves, the patterns of light sliding past. Wonder what it is. Kinda seems like a display, but if it is, what is it displaying? Well, time for rest. Still another few weeks in Jump. All these questions can wait while I ensure that the ship is going to remain functional.