This wasn't a great idea.

I got a little out of hand, jumped the gun on this project. The original serial isn't finished, and trying to start editing it was a mistake. If you're interested, you can find it over here, and I do recommend starting at the beginning. Thank you.

Tour Guide

“It still says that your right arm should be complete in two more days. Your left a day after that.” Carbon thumbed her way through his readout on a tablet, sipping from a bottle of water as she scanned the text scrolling by.

Alex had been asking about his progress every day since his head and neck were released more than a day ahead of schedule. “That’ll be a relief. It’ll be great to feed myself again. Not that I don’t appreciate the help.”

Groundwork

“This is how I see it. If you asked me six months ago what I’d be doing now, I’d have exactly one item right.” Over the past few days, the routine had fallen into Carbon feeding him and then disappearing for long periods of time. She was giving him regular updates on what she was doing in regards to the engines. So far it was mostly cleaning up the damage, with the occasional technical task that went way over his head.

Dinner Conversation

“I cannot understand how so fractured a society managed to reach space.” Carbon shook her head and offered up the straw to the bag of food to him again.

“I hear that a lot.” He took a pull of passable beef stew and swallowed. It had been covered in school, actually. They - the Tslao, Eohm, and Tkt - all had apparently homogeneous cultures. The Tslao in particular had a difficult time wrapping their heads around the panoply of humanity. “Not that specifically, but something similar.”

Working Order

After things settled down and Carbon had departed again, autosurgeon still latched on to her abdomen, Alex managed to get some sleep.

Then he woke up hungry.

Given that his injuries didn’t extend much beyond his limbs, the mediboard should have extruded a feeding tube into his nose and been squirting a food-like substance directly into his stomach. Not exactly a pleasant thing to consider, but it took care of the issue of starvation.

One Good Turn

Carbon didn’t respond to him immediately. She fished the first cannister of drugs from the dispenser tray and loaded it into an injector. She winced as she pressed it to her arm, holding it in place until it beeped empty. When she replied, her voice was ragged and tired, teeth tinged a dark red already.  “Eight hundreds. One thousands. Between.”

Alex didn’t know what unit she was using. Definitely wasn’t Gray, which would have rendered her dead a few times over. Roentgen? Could be. Probably some Tslao measurement he’d never heard of. “That’s a lot.”

Keystone

Alex didn’t find sleep quickly. He spent hours staring at the ceiling, only able to turn his eye far enough to see the clock on the wall. When he did, the dream came almost immediately.

He pushed himself up out the the cockpit of the simulator, blinking in the bright lights of the sim bay. He had a stupid sort of grin on his face, an enthusiasm that permeated the whole of his being. “If that’s what the next generation of Waverider drives is going... I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.”