12 Tricking Out the Dashboard

Alekai sat there, staring at the panel in front of him, fiddling with the way it moved in his hand with thought command.

"It's good that you're playing with the control platform," Jesse's voice broke through his drifting mental thoughts. "This is cutting-edge technology. It allows you to create whatever type of controls you want."

"You mean I can change this flat panel to whatever I want?"

"Yes. If you work well with a mouse, have a mouse appear. If you prefer a joystick, make that. Bessie will recognize what you need if you call her name and tell her what you want."

Alekai snorted. "I don't think Bessie is going to be able to create what I really want."

"Try her." Jesse prompted.

Alekai shrugged. Here went nothing.

"Bessie. Make me a motorcycle handle."

"What type of motorcycle handle are you looking to recreate?" Bessie asked in her most professional metallic-tinged voice.

Alekai chuffed. Bessie was not joking around.

He immediately thought of his old classic Triumph bike still on the ground and felt an emotional surge.

He loved that bike.

He had so much minute control over it that it was almost like an extension of his own body.

"Can you make a Triumph's handlebars?"

Immediately, a set of generic Triumph handlebars began to take shape in front of him.

Gasping with amazement, Alekai reached out and touched it.

His mind immediately projected onto his hands the muscle memory of the specific handlebars he was used to.

Bessie immediately created the bars from the mental image he projected into her sensors.

"Thicker right here and here," he muttered. "I need a throttle on this side. Can you make the grips more rubbery feeling?"

"What would you like for the throttle to do?"

"It adds power to increase speed on a regular bike so I need it to increase the speed that we are traveling at."

"Understood. Throttle generated." Bessie's voice droned out.

"I need brakes on this side."

"Brakes generated."

"I don't need a clutch do I?"

"I can add it for you to feel more comfortable, but it is not necessary. I can control that part of the flight for you."

"Then omit it. I just need to be able to speed up and slow down at will."

He tested the motorcycle handlebars.

"Can I steer with this thing?"

"Would you like three-dimensional steering?"

"Yes!" Alekai grinned.

"Three-dimensional space steering generated. You can now move in sagittal, frontal, as well as transverse planes."

"Super cool!" Alekai grinned. This bike could do things his Triumph would never be able to do.

"Where would you like to place your weapons?"

Alekai gasped. There were weapons?

His eyes lit up. The Triumph's handlebars didn't exactly have a weapons discharge button, but it didn't mean he couldn't add one.

"How many types of weapons do I have access to?"

"You have access to beam weapons, kinetic weapons, and missiles."

"I need to see a list of what you have."

Immediately, a screen popped up in front of him. Bessie began to run a list of the weapons, the number of missiles, and the amount of energy required to discharge the weapons.

He reached out with eager fingers at the virtual screen and began scrolling through the various weapons and missiles that were available and ready to be deployed.

The more Alekai read through, the bigger his eyes got. He read through the list a couple of times to commit it to memory and then waved his hand to clear the virtual screen.

"Add beams here, kinetics here, and missiles here." He indicated the places on the handles where the weapons would be within easy reach, allowing him to use all ten fingers to control every single weapon equipped on the Gear.

"And keep the power monitors and the weapons monitors visible at all times." He added.

"This will take up some visual space on your screen."

"It's fine. Put it here and here," he pointed to the space around him.

"Power monitors visible. Weapons monitors visible."

"Make this higher. Drop this down a bit. And how do I get rear view mirrors so I can see behind me?"

In answer, a virtual window appeared with the visual for the Gear's backside.

"Awesome. Put that here..."

As Alekai chattered with Bessie to set up his control dashboard and steering, in the chamber below him, Jesse was flying Bessie to the starship Caravan.

"Caravan, this is Jesse. Come in Caravan."

"Jesse, how are you doing?" Captain Anapolis's face appeared on her monitor. "Were you able to extract the target?"

"Captain. Can you please just call him Alekai? He's a person, not an object."

"Answer the question, Lieutenant."

"Yes, yes. He's above me in the Command Deck, tooling and tricking out his control panel."

"Does he know what his mission is?"

"We haven't had a chance to talk about it yet."

"Lieutenant, make sure he is briefed on the mission. When you come onboard, get him geared up and start his training sessions. I want him ready to begin the mission within two weeks."

"Yes Ma'am."

"Now, We will be swinging by your area in two hours. Make sure you are at the location coordinates I have sent so that we can pick you up and quickly take off from there."

"Yes Ma'am."

"And Lieutenant."

"Yes Ma'am?"

"Don't scare the new recruit. You can be a bit…bombastic at times."

Jesse laughed. "Yes Ma'am."

She signed off with Captain Anapolis and set the coordinates for rendezvous with the starship Caravan.

Above her, Alekai was still chatting with Bessie about, of all things, stochastic differential equations regarding the velocity, acceleration, and force, over time-dependent random variables.

Jesse was no slouch when it came to the mathematics of space flight, but Alekai was digging into high level mathematics of weapon speeds and trajectories, things she didn't have much experience with.

Most of what they were chatting about flew way over her head so after a few minutes, she tuned him out and turned on some high energy space music from one of the latest music groups of the Northern quadrant.

On the ground, it was a sun-drenched afternoon.

Once they broke past the mesopause, (lower reaches of space) it was perpetual night with a huge blue expanse below.

Her eyes grew heavy as she stared out into the deep endless void of the Universe but Jesse knew better than to take a nap within the Gear.

Although Bessie did most of the manual flying work, Jesse never could fully rest even though the vast majority of space travel was one of utter boredom.

They were far above the Kármán Line so there was no fear of dropping back into the Earth's atmosphere. Still, there was always the constant low-level threat of hostile attacks coming from random directions.

Since they had two hours to burn, Jesse located the sound clip detailing the mission. No time like the present to get Alekai up to speed on what they had to do.

She was about to break into the high-level conversation Alekai was having with Bessie when the security alerts began sounding.

WARNING. UNKNOWN ENTITY APPROACHING. WARNING.