The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (61 page)

It wasn't much of a light, and she still had to approach it cautiously. True to her suspicions there was a nasty gap in the floor where the ship had split on impact. There was some debris around this opening, and Caroline dropped a piece of metal into the abyss; it bounced several times before splashing into the water far below. Had Caroline gone bounding down the corridor, she'd have ended up in a nasty way.
By tossing debris across it she determined that the gap was a couple of meters wide. There was no obvious way across it. Except one. Although Caroline was in excellent shape, it would be very risky in the pitch blackness. But it was this or back to the elevator shaft, and the light was too tempting. She backed off, pacing carefully, then broke into a run toward the gap. Twenty paces, ten, five... NOW! She jumped, and braced herself.
To her great surprise, she made the jump successfully and didn't even trip when she landed. She felt behind her and found that she had made it with only a few centimeters to spare. The protruding edge of the deck was rough and jagged; if she had fallen short, she would have been badly cut even if she had managed to haul herself up.
Working carefully, testing the floor for more gaps, she approached the light.
It was a sign, written in alien, unreadable script. But from the shape of the box it was decorating, Caroline guessed that it said "emergency" or something similar. Caroline found the handle that she imagined must open the box, held her breath, and pulled it.
The box didn't open. In fact, something much more dramatic happened.
The lights came on.

Caroline's exploration was much easier with the emergency system on; not only was there light, but doors and elevators worked. She was still careful, but her progress was much more rapid.
The inhabitable part of the ship was a cylinder, wrapped around some kind of central core. With the power on she was able to find stores of food, bland stuff in hard-to-open plastic pouches. She tested one, didn't get sick, then ate four. Her appetite seemed to be operating normally, and she hadn't eaten in almost two days. Other pouches proved to contain vaguely sweet liquid.
She didn't trust the elevators, but she had to use them; she tested them by sending them off unoccupied, then if they came back she assumed they were safe. In this way she gradually ascended, level by level. She found tools, and took something that was probably a flashlight and certainly worked well enough to be used as one. She didn't wonder how the batteries came to still be good; she knew it was all there for her benefit. None of it had really happened by accident.
Eleven levels higher she found herself on an empty, circular platform. Now she could look down into the center of the ship. She expected to find propulsion devices, or perhaps a nuclear reactor. But when she pointed her flashlight down into the darkened core, it revealed banks and banks of circuit cards. The entire ship was wrapped around a huge computer.
Many cards had been knocked out of their sockets by the crash-landing; some hung loosely out of their card cages, and other slots were empty. The cylinder extended most of the length of the ship; it was half-full of water. Beneath the water, the floor of the cylinder was littered with loose cards.
A couple of card cages extended high enough for her to reach them; she climbed over the railing, hung on, and pulled one of the loose cards free. It was a very unusual design, Caroline realized. She knew something about electronics, and she knew no real computer had ever been this simple. The card contained banks of identical, three-legged components that looked for all the world like big transistors. But there was no intricacy to their connection pattern; the components were all simply wired in parallel. Instead of a card-edge connector, the card mated to its cage through a three-prong plug.
Shaking her head, Caroline put the card aside and called the elevator for the next level.