Sonia starts to collect her tools and put them back into her toolbox, a small green box with a cord attached to her belt. She leans back on the cushion that she brought down into the machine’s guts a couple months ago, giving her just the barest comforts. She tightens one more valve before putting away one of her smaller wrenches. The glowing light of the screen in the crevice of the machine asks if she wants to “Oscillate.” She nods.

The display turns a bright red and shows the words “DO NOT MOVE, OSCILLATION IN PROCESS.” Sonia closes her eyes and holds her breath as the machine starts to whirl alive. She listens to every hiss and scream of the device as it awakens, mentally marking if any need to be corrected. 

A large pendulum comes swinging down towards the crevice that Sonia is hiding in, just inches to her left. It swings right above the chalk mark that she made on the ground when she first became this ship’s mechanic. The job position opened in the first place because of a botched oscillation. She was incredibly grateful that they cleaned the place up before she joined.

(more…)