Thomas held onto a handle on the wall as the shuttle fired its forward thrusters to slow down for docking. The thrusters stopped and the shuttle drifted slowly forward into the dock. Loud thuds resonated through the hull as magnetic docking clamps locked the shuttle in place. The lights in the airlock turned green, declaring the passage into the station was secure. Thomas readjusted his backpack and went through the airlocks onto the station.

He was immediately assaulted by a man in a gray suit wielding a crowbar. He blocked with his arm and got a nice bruise. After two hits, the graysuit suddenly stopped and shook as if he was extremely cold, and fell to the ground. A clown ran up, cuffed the graysuit, and dragged him off into a maintenance passageway. Thomas looked incredulously at the maintenance airlock, shrugged, and headed off to medbay while holding a map.

He arrived at medbay and was greeted by the sight of a man in a bulky suit dragging an extremely pale corpse up to the desk.
"Miss, I've got another one. He ran into the bar with no internals and suffocated while I was getting my crate from cargo." said the suited man. The nurse at the desk said something into her headset, and a few moments later a the doors opened and a doctor dragged the corpse into the depths of medbay. The man in the suit turned around and saw Thomas standing there.

“You must be Thomas. I’ve been expecting you,” He looked at Thomas’s head, which was as bare as “but you weren’t answering your radio, and it seems that you don’t have one.” The man walked over to a locker and opened it. He took out a headset, unscrewed a panel on it, and inserted a small chip. “Here’s a radio. I put the engineering encryption key in it so you can hear and speak on the engineering channel. You're going to want to grab a hardsuit from the engineering storage, a toolbelt too. it’s at the far end of the engine room. Don’t touch any buttons, you might open the shutters, and the singularity engine is not entirely safe if you know what I mean. Oh, never introduced myself, the name’s Saul, nice to meet you.” Saul handed Thomas the headset and shook his hand. Thomas mumbled a thanks and then rushed down the hallway, evading the dozens of banana peels littered about, with an angry botanist, an annoyed janitor, and a security officer with a notepad talking near the wall.

Thomas entered the engineering foyer and slipped on some motor oil, hitting his arm against the table and reminding him of why he had gone to medbay. He got up and headed through the engine room to the storage. As he passed by the shutters to the Particle accelerator, he felt a force pulling him towards it. He kept walking a and went into the storage, He grabbed a suit off the rack and put it on. He dispensed an oxygen tank from a machine and set the release pressure to 21 kPa, filled it to full from a large canister, and attached it to the valve on the back of his suit. He rushed out of the department, away from the sinister pull from beyond.

As he was walking out of the engineering foyer into the hallway, he tripped on some soap and got dragged in a circle, a bike horn went HONK! in his face, and then the clown ran off with the soap, laughing maniacally. Thomas stood up and shuffled off towards medbay.

On his way back, the hallway airlocks were bolted shut and he felt a current when he touched the panel with his gloves. He turned up the volume on his radio headset to see what people were talking about.

“The AI has gone rogue. Equip internals, and weld vents to prevent it from pumping in harmful gases”

“The yellow wire is the AI control wire! Cut the yellow wires in all the Area Power Controllers, and destroy the flashing blue ones.”
“Don’t touch airlocks unless you have insulated gloves! The AI has shocked most of them.”

Thomas looked around for an unbolted airlock, and headed into maintenance. He climbed around a bit, and came out in the med-sci hallway. He walked down the hallway and used his crowbar to pry open the firelock the AI had lowered. There was a bunch of security in the medbay foyer, all crowded around the chemistry desk. “The thermite will be done in a minute! Is the path the the chamber open?”

“Sort of.” one of the security officers said.

“Wait, what do you mean?” the Head of Security asked.

“Eh, well the security borg is still alive, and it’s been tasering people who get near the AI.”

“Why the hell did the Research Director not blow all the borgs?!” yelled the HoS.

“The RD got shot with a taser by a borg and his reactive teleport armor sent him into space. Suit sensors indicate he’s floating outside atmospherics.”

The HoS put his face in his palm,and when he looked up again, he saw Thomas standing in the hallway. “Hey you, engineer, go get the Research director would you? We need to his ID to blow the last borg, and we might as well clone him.”

“Sure.” said Thomas. He walked over to the main desk and got some bandages for his arm, then headed down towards departures.

His helmet light illuminated the airlock. Luckily the AI hadn’t bolted it before the power was shut off. Thomas pulled the crowbar from his belt and jammed it into the airlock. He pushed it back and forth, trying to get it further in the crease. He forced the bar down, and the airlock came open. He put the crowbar back in his belt and used his hands to force it the rest of the way open. He looked at the external airlocks and saw that they were welded shut, so he walked over to one of the windows, unscrewed it, and pried it from the frame. There was a metal grille that he disassembled, and then another window. As he stuck his crowbar between the second window and the frame, he felt air being sucked into space, and activated his internals. The cool oxygen flowed into his now-sealed suit, cooling his warm skin. He pushed out the window, and drifted off out into space.

He drifted into wall of the part ‘southern’ atmospherics, which juts out from the station. Thomas holds onto the metal struts sticking out from the station. The radio is eerily silent as he crawls his way around atmospherics. As he rounds the corner, he sees the RD floating 5 meters from the struts, with an extremely dissatisfied look on his face. Thomas pulls a cable coil from his belt and ties it to the struts and to his belt, then pushes himself towards the RD. The RD’s body was pretty stiff. Mission accomplished, he headed back the way he’d come, pulling himself back to the struts using the cable.

“You’re back! I see you have the RD with you.” said the only security officer still standing there. “The HoS told me to tell you to drop the body here and use the ID to get into his office and activate the emergency full destruct on the cyborg management console.” Thomas set down the body and pulled his id out of the chest pocket, then ran across the hall and went into the science bay. Electricity was still on in the science area. Somebody in a dark gray jumpsuit with a welding mask on ran up to him. “Hey, you have the ID right? Hand it to me.” said the man. Thomas handed him the ID and followed him as he walked down the hallway. “We disabled AI control of all our systems, and replaced the parts that couldn’t be fixed. Should be a piece of cake now that we have an ID with clearance.”

They arrived at the RD’s office and walked right in, the man with the welding mask scanning the ID at the door. He pressed some buttons on the middle console and slid the ID through a scanner. “Now we just wait about 60 seconds and it’ll blow up. Simple.” He sat down in the office chair. Thomas leaned up against the wall.

60 seconds later, nothing over the radio

5 minutes later, telecommunications are restored.

“We did it crew, we won!” yelled the Head of Security.

“The shuttle is free, call it!” squawked Poly the parrot.

“Shut up poly!” said Saul the Chief Engineer, Poly’s owner.

“That was a bit anticlimactic.” said the Chef.

“Life’s like that sometimes.” said the Head of Personnel.

“Where’d the Captain go?” asked an assistant.

“Oh him? His soul left and we couldn’t clone him. The clown got a hold of his ID and is running around with all-access. Watch out.”


The man with the welding mask extended his hand to Thomas. “The name’s Mark, I’m the roboticist. Welcome aboard.” They shook hands.

“Shouldn’t there have been things to prevent this from happening?” asked Thomas.

“Why? Life’s more exciting this way.” said the roboticist.

“Has anything like this ever happen before?” said Thomas.

“Yeah. Happens all the time. Something happens every shift.” the roboticist said.

Thomas did not know what to say. He headed down to the chapel and climbed into the Mass Driver meant for space burials. Nobody ever saw him again.