Tanya stared at the holographic display floating above her childhood desk, watching cargo freighter schematics rotate in slow, hypnotic circles. Three days home, and she still hadn't cracked the problem. Every design she'd attempted ran headfirst into the same wall: the Empire had already optimised everything.
Harvester to crop hopper. Crop hopper to transport pod. Transport pod to orbital elevator. Elevator to cargo freighter. The entire supply chain was a masterwork of standardisation, refined over decades until every component interfaced perfectly with every other component. It was beautiful, efficient, and absolutely impenetrable to a newcomer with grand ideas.
"Come on," she muttered, dismissing another failed design. "There has to be something. Some gap, some inefficiency..."
//Market analysis suggests limited opportunities for improvement in established systems,// Sage observed with what she was learning to recognise as diplomatic pessimism. //Your current approach targets mature technologies with extensive optimisation cycles.//
"So what am I supposed to do? Build pleasure yachts for rich tourists?"
//Alternative markets exist. However, they require different design philosophies.//
"Such as?"
//That information will become apparent through practical application.//
Tanya groaned and rubbed her temples. Sometimes talking to Sage was like getting career advice from a fortune cookie.
A knock on her bedroom door interrupted her frustration. "Tanya? You awake, sweetheart?"
"Come in, Dad."
Her father appeared in the doorway, still in his work clothes despite the late hour. Dust and plant matter clung to his shirt, and his hands bore the permanent stains of someone who worked the soil for a living.
"Sorry to bother you," he said, settling into the chair beside her desk. "I know you're probably busy with important city-folk business, but I could use your brain on something."
"My brain is entirely at your disposal," she said, closing the holographic display. "What's the problem?"
"It's the Dowells. You remember the Dowells?"
Tanya nodded. "Small farm on the eastern plateau? Jane was in my year at school."
"That's them. They're in a bad spot, Tanya. Real bad." Her father's expression darkened. "Their main harvester broke down three weeks ago. Then their backup. Now they've got crops rotting in the field and no way to bring them in."
"Can't they rent equipment? Buy replacements?"
Her father's laugh was bitter. "That's the problem. Eden-Five isn't profitable enough for the big equipment manufacturers anymore. We're too small, too out of the way. Orders take months to fulfill, if they bother taking them at all. And the prices..." He shook his head. "They're pricing small farms right out of existence."
Tanya felt something cold settle in her stomach. "How bad is it?"
"Bad enough that good people are losing farms their families have worked for generations. The Dowells aren't the only ones, they're just the worst hit right now." He leaned forward, clasping his hands together. "Look, I know you're a designer, not a mechanic. But I was hoping you could take a look at their machines tomorrow. Maybe tell us what it would take to get them running again."
The request sparked something in Tanya's chest; it was not just sympathy, but genuine excitement. Here was a real problem, affecting real people she'd grown up with. Not some abstract market analysis, but neighbours who needed help. While the harvester wasn't a starship, it shared many systems with one and would be good to practice on.
"Dad," she said, grinning, "I'd much rather fix it myself."
He blinked. "Fix it yourself? Honey, these are industrial harvesters. Large combines with fusion power cores and AI guidance systems. They're not exactly weekend projects."
"Trust me," she said, already mentally cataloguing the tools she'd need. "I've learned a few things about hands-on engineering lately."
The next morning found them driving across the coastal plains in her father's ancient truck, the same vehicle that had carried her to school countless times. The familiar rhythm of gravel under tires and wind through open windows brought back a flood of memories. The old farmers could have moved to hover vehicles, but they didn't trust anything that didn't have wheels.
"You've changed," her father said, glancing at her from the driver's seat. "Not just the way you look, but the way you carry yourself. More confident."
"University will do that," she said, which wasn't entirely a lie.
"Mmm." He didn't sound entirely convinced. "This master shipwright you mentioned in your message. He must have been quite the teacher."
//Deflection recommended,// Sage whispered in her mind.
"He had some unconventional methods," Tanya said carefully. "Really emphasised the importance of understanding every aspect of the construction process."
They turned onto the Dowell farm's access road, and Tanya was struck by how much smaller it looked than she remembered. The farmhouse was the same weathered white, the fields still stretched toward the horizon, but there was a sense of struggle that hadn't been there in her childhood. Crops stood unharvested in neat rows, slowly browning under Eden-Five's twin suns.
Jane Dowell met them at the farmhouse, and the years seemed to melt away. She'd grown taller and broader through the shoulders, with the kind of practical strength that came from working the land, but her smile was exactly the same.
"Tanya Furrow," she said, wiping her hands on a work-stained apron. "Look at you, all fancy from the big city."
"Look at you," Tanya replied, "running your own farm and being completely gorgeous while you do it."
They hugged like the old friends they were, and for a moment, thoughts of the broken harvesters and failing crops seemed distant.
"I hear you're some kind of engineering wizard now," Jane said as they walked toward the equipment sheds. "Dad's hoping you can work some miracle on our machines."
"I'll do my best," Tanya said. "No promises, but I'll take a look."
The harvester was a monster. One hundred meters of articulated agricultural machinery, with cutting heads that could process an entire field in a single pass. It squatted in the shed like a sleeping giant, all curves and angles designed for maximum efficiency.
And it was completely dead.
"Power core's fine," Jane explained, leading them around the massive machine. "Navigation systems check out. But something in the processing unit just... stopped. Won't engage, won't respond to diagnostics. It's like it forgot how to be a harvester."
Tanya approached the machine, pulling out her multitool and trying to look nonchalant about it. "Mind if I run some scans? This is new tech from Barth, might pick up something your standard diagnostics missed."
"Go for it," Jane said. "At this point, I'll try anything."
The multitool's scanner painted the harvester in brilliant holographic detail, revealing systems and subsystems in ways that made Tanya's brain sing with excitement. But as she studied the design, her excitement curdled into something else entirely.
Anger.
The harvester was a masterwork of intentional weakness. Components that should have been built to last decades were designed to fail after specific operating cycles. Maintenance access points were positioned to require specialised tools that cost more than most farmers made in a month. Critical systems had single points of failure that could disable the entire machine. It was nothing like the optimised blueprints she had been studying back in her room.
"This is criminal," she muttered, examining a power coupling that was engineered to degrade after exactly three years of operation.
"What's that?" Jane asked.
Tanya straightened up, her jaw set with determination. "Jane, how would you feel about letting me completely redesign this thing?"
"Redesign it?" Sarah's father, Lucas, had asked, and he joined them in the shed. "It's a Mark VII Industrial Harvester. They don't redesign themselves."
"They do if you know what you're doing," Tanya said, her mind already racing with possibilities. "I can make it more reliable, more efficient, and easier to maintain. It'll take me a few days, but I can turn this into a machine that'll run for twenty years without major repairs."
Lucas and Jane exchanged glances. "What's the catch?" Lucas asked.
"No catch. I do the work for free, but I want permission to use the before-and-after data for marketing purposes. I'm starting a freelance engineering business, and this would be perfect for my portfolio."
Her father raised an eyebrow. "You're starting a business? Since when?"
"Since I realised there are people out here who need better equipment than the corporations are willing to provide," Tanya said, surprising herself with the conviction in her voice. "Someone needs to look out for the little guys."
It may have been a front, but she found that it had some real conviction behind it. Maybe even a path forward.
Jane grinned. "You always were the idealistic one. Yes, absolutely. If you can get this thing running better than new, you can plaster our farm's name all over your advertisements."
"Deal," Tanya said, already planning the modifications she'd need to make. "I'll have it back to you in three days, running better than it ever has."
That night, after her parents had gone to bed, Tanya slipped out of the house and made her way to the coast. The Nova Theseus was waiting where she'd left it, patient and glowing under Eden-Five's moons.
The flight to Crescent Isle took only minutes. After being teleported, which was a unique experience. The workshop materialised around her like magic, which it essentially was, bringing with it the familiar scents of ozone and possibility.
"Alright, Sage," she said, pulling up the harvester's schematics on the main holographic display. "Let's fix some broken things."
//Design analysis complete. Identifying optimisation opportunities.//
The harvester's blueprint appeared in the air before her, rotating slowly as Sage highlighted weakness after weakness. Planned obsolescence masquerading as cost-cutting. Single-point failures disguised as streamlined design. A machine built not to serve farmers, but to generate service calls and replacement sales.
"They're taking advantage of people who just want to feed their families," Tanya said, her hands already moving across the interface. "That ends now."
//Redesign parameters: maximise reliability, minimise maintenance requirements, optimise for extended operational cycles.//
"Exactly." Tanya cracked her knuckles and got to work. "Time to show these corporate parasites what real engineering looks like."
The workshop felt different with the harvester looming in its centre, it had become crowded, more purposeful. The massive agricultural machine dominated the space like a beached whale, its hundred-meter length forcing Tanya to relocate half her fabrication equipment to the workshop's outer rings.
"Well," she said, walking around the harvester's bulk, "this is cozy."
//Spatial optimisation required. Recommend equipment relocation to secondary bays.//
"Or we could just make the workshop bigger?"
//Workshop expansion beyond current parameters would destabilise the structure. The current configuration represents the maximum stable volume. Access to larger workshops still locked by protocols.//
Tanya shrugged and began the tedious process of moving equipment by hand. Precision manipulators, material synthesisers, and diagnostic stations all had to be repositioned to accommodate their new centrepiece. It was honest work, the kind that made her shoulders ache in satisfying ways.
"Sage," she said, hefting a particularly stubborn fabrication unit, "couldn't you just teleport these pieces like you did with the harvester?"
//Affirmative. Spatial displacement protocols remain functional.//
"So why didn't you offer?"
//You did not request assistance.//
Tanya paused mid-lift, staring at the harvester. "Are you telling me I spent two hours moving equipment around when you could have just... moved them directly?"
//Correct.//
"And you didn't think to mention this?"
//Educational value exists in manual equipment organisation. You now possess a comprehensive understanding of workshop spatial relationships. The importance of proper planning//
Tanya set down the fabrication unit with exaggerated care. "Sometimes, Sage, I think you enjoy watching me suffer."
//Suffering is not the objective. Understanding is.//
"Right." She wiped sweat from her forehead. "Well, next time, maybe lead with the magic teleportation option?"
//Noted for future reference.//
With the equipment finally repositioned, Tanya could begin the real work. She approached the harvester with a plasma cutter in hand, ready to begin the systematic disassembly that would reveal its secrets.
"I assume you're not going to help with this part either?" she asked. She already knew the answer as they had had this conversation before, but she was trying her luck to see.
//Correct. Disassembly provides an essential understanding of component relationships and failure modes. An automated breakdown would prevent proper learning synthesis.//
"Of course it would." Tanya activated the plasma cutter and patting the harvester on it's side, "Sorry old girl, this is for your own good," before using its brilliant beam to slice through the harvester's access panels with surgical precision. "God forbid I learn something the easy way."
But as she worked, pulling apart the massive machine piece by piece, she found herself grateful for Sage's stubborn insistence on hands-on learning. Each component told a story, about the engineers who had designed it, the accountants who had compromised it, and the farmers who'd struggled with its inevitable failures and now the poor farm girl who had to remove it.
The electrical routing was a nightmare of cost-cutting decisions. Power conduits snaked through the machine's frame in ways that prioritised cable length over reliability, creating electromagnetic interference patterns that would degrade system performance over time. Critical connections were routed through high-stress areas where vibration would eventually work them loose. All of it was easy to spot, even to an untrained engineer.
"Look at this," she muttered, following a power cable that ran directly alongside the main hydraulic line. "One leak, and the entire electrical system shorts out. What were they thinking?"
//Cost optimisation frequently prioritises initial production expense over operational reliability.//
The bearing assemblies were even worse. Supposedly rated for ten years of agricultural use, they were built with materials that would begin to degrade after three seasons of normal operation. Not catastrophic failure as that would generate warranty claims but gradual performance reduction that farmers would accept as natural wear.
"Planned obsolescence disguised as engineering tolerance," Tanya said, examining a bearing that should have been rated for fifty thousand hours but was clearly designed to seize after twenty thousand. "They're stealing years of productivity from these people."
But it was the computer core that revealed the true depth of the manufacturer's exploitation. The harvester's brain was a perfectly functional quantum processing unit, capable of running for decades without significant degradation. The problem wasn't the hardware, it was software licensing.
The unit required annual authentication codes from the manufacturer. Miss a payment, and the entire harvester became an expensive lawn ornament. But even paying customers weren't safe with the authentication process that included mandatory software updates that gradually increased processing overhead until the original hardware could no longer keep up.
"They're not selling harvesters," Tanya said, staring at the corrupted core in disgust. "They're selling subscriptions with free farm equipment attached."
Even though that wasn't this old girl's problem, her start-up script had become corrupted, but the only way to fix it was to use the company software and to pay a fee. For something that should have been a quick reboot to fix.
//Accurate assessment. Service-based revenue models prioritise recurring payments over customer satisfaction.//
She wasn't sure if Sage found that to be a good or bad thing, or was just stating the facts of life. Maybe they were only human facts of life. I doubted the race that lived on the rogue planet had the same issues.
Tanya spent the next six hours cataloguing every deliberate weakness, every engineered failure point, every place where corporate greed had trumped honest engineering. By the time she finished, she had a comprehensive list of modifications that would transform the harvester from a profit-extraction device into a genuine tool for agricultural productivity. Only about 70% of them had shown up on her multi-tool initial scan.
Most of the fixes were straightforward. Reroute the electrical systems for proper shielding and accessibility. Replace the engineered-failure bearings with components designed for actual longevity. Install an open-source computer core that answers to the farmers, not corporate licensing departments. That one would require some help, as they didn't make it easy to replace computer core systems.
But some problems ran deeper than intentional sabotage. The harvester's main articulation joints, which were the massive hinges that allowed its cutting heads to follow ground contours, were simply fighting a losing battle against physics. The stresses involved were enormous, and no amount of redesign could eliminate the fundamental wear patterns that would eventually cause failure.
This, of course, was not something covered in her university lectures on spaceship design, but she found it an interesting problem nonetheless.
Traditional engineering offered two solutions: make the joints easily replaceable, treating them as consumable components, or over-engineer them with exotic materials that could handle the stress indefinitely.
Tanya had a third option.
She pulled out her sample of the adaptive material she had salvaged from the alien ruins. Even in its raw form, she could see the potential. The material's crystalline structure actually strengthened under stress, reorganising itself to distribute loads more efficiently. Applied to the harvester's articulation joints, it would eliminate wear patterns entirely.
The problem was fabrication. Her multitool could analyse the material's composition as exotic alloys arranged in mathematically precise patterns but understanding what something was made of didn't reveal how to make it. The manufacturing process remained a mystery, locked away in the ruins of a dead civilisation.
"Sage, how much of this material do I have?"
//Current inventory: 12.3 kilograms of adaptive composite. Sufficient for limited applications.//
"And I can't make more?"
//Manufacturing protocols for adaptive materials are restricted information. //
Tanya stared at the alien material, weighing her options. She could use most of her remaining sample to upgrade the harvester's critical joints, creating a machine that would outlast its owners by decades. But doing so would leave her with almost nothing for future projects.
Or she could save the material and accept a lesser solution for the harvester, better than the original, but not revolutionary.
The decision came easier than she had expected. Sarah Dowell had crops rotting in the field and a family legacy hanging in the balance. Also need to put on the best show if I wish to use this as my example.
"Right then," she said, placing 11.6 kilograms of alien composite into the fabrication chamber. "Let's make some joints that'll last forever."
The fabrication process was delicate work, requiring precise control of temperature, pressure, and molecular alignment. Even with the workshop's advanced equipment, shaping the adaptive material took hours of careful manipulation. But when she finally held the completed joints, she knew the effort had been worthwhile.
They were beautiful in the way that truly functional objects could be with elegant curves that followed stress lines, surfaces that seemed to glow with inner light and construction that felt more grown with love than manufactured.
The reassembly took another twelve hours. Every system had to be rewired, every bearing replaced, every component upgraded or optimised. Her hands grew black with synthetic lubricants, and her back ached from crawling through the harvester's maintenance spaces, but with each improvement, she felt the machine transform into a genuine farming tool.
Her comm unit chimed around hour ten.
"Tanya?" Her mother's voice carried the particular tone of parental concern that could cross interstellar distances. "Where are you, sweetheart? You missed dinner."
"Sorry, Mum," Tanya said, not looking up from the power coupling she was installing. "I'm borrowing someone's workshop to work on the Dowell harvester. Got a bit carried away."
"Whose workshop? I thought we knew everyone on the planet with equipment sophisticated enough for industrial repairs."
Tanya paused, realising she'd painted herself into a corner. Eden-Five was exactly the kind of small community where everyone knew everyone else's business.
"It's... complicated," she said finally. "I'll explain everything tomorrow, I promise. Right now, I just need to finish this job."
A pause. Then her father's voice: "Are you safe?"
"Completely safe, Dad. Just focused."
"Alright. But if you're not home by breakfast, we're sending out search parties."
"Understood. Love you both."
She closed the comm link and got back to work, trying not to think about the explanations she would eventually have to provide. How did you tell your parents that you'd discovered an alien workshop and buried it under a nearby island? That you'd been upgraded by an artificial intelligence from a dead civilisation? That their daughter had accidentally become the galaxy's most improbable student of impossible engineering?
Those were problems for Future Tanya. Present Tanya had a harvester to finish.
By the time she installed the final component and ran the last diagnostic check, Eden-Five's twin suns were painting the eastern sky in shades of gold and rose. The harvester came to life with quiet efficiency, its systems operating in harmony for the first time in its existence.
She ran her hand along one of the new articulation joints, feeling the subtle warmth that indicated the adaptive material was already beginning to learn its operational parameters. In a few days, it would be stronger than when she'd installed it. In a few months, it would be practically indestructible.
"Not bad for a night's work," she said, stepping back to admire the completed machine.
"Can't call you old girl any more, will need a new name"
//Assessment: significant improvement achieved. Operational lifetime increased by approximately 300%. Maintenance requirements reduced by 85%. Performance optimisation achieved across all primary systems.//
"Think the Dowells will be happy?"
//Probable. However, the broader implications of this modification require consideration.//
"What do you mean?"
//You have demonstrated the ability to significantly improve industrial equipment using a material and technique unknown to your civilisation. If widely implemented, this would generate considerable attention.//
Tanya studied the harvester, running her hand over its newly reinforced plating. It was a quiet revolution waiting to happen. But a single unit, tucked away on a remote property? That wouldn't rock any boats.
"Then no one needs to find out," she said. "One harvester in the middle of Eden-Five won't start a panic or make the news."
//Accurate: provided the upgrade remains isolated. Secrecy will prevent the pattern from being noticed.//
The harvester sat silent in the workshop, looking perfectly ordinary to anyone who didn't know what had been done to it. Tomorrow, she'd deliver it to the Dowells, smile, and let them think it was just another piece of well-maintained machinery. The truth could stay between her, Sage, and the machine itself.
But for now, she had built something that would help her neighbours keep their farm. And sometimes, that was enough.
//Observation: your approach to harvester optimisation demonstrates advanced shipwright principles,// Sage noted as she gathered her tools.
//The integration of multiple systems, materials analysis, and adaptive engineering solutions directly correlates to spacecraft design challenges. Agricultural equipment and starships share fundamental requirements: reliability under stress, efficient resource utilisation, and operational longevity in harsh environments. This project has advanced your practical understanding of these principles.//
Tanya paused, considering the alien intelligence's words. She had approached the harvester like a ship by analysing every system, understanding how components worked together, and optimising for performance rather than just function. Without realising it, she'd been practising shipwright skills on a terrestrial scale.
"So fixing farm equipment is just spacecraft engineering with gravity?" she asked.
//Crude but essentially accurate. The principles remain constant regardless of the operational environment. Your efforts here qualify you for a reward//
Tanya perked up at that, but that was before she felt a sting behind her ear. She had wondered what Sage had done this time, but then she understood as knowledge on the adaptive material flooded her mind.