As the printer continued to make parts for the better quantum PC, I continued to read everything Lola had gathered thus far.

  It would just take money to get me connected to Lola in a lawful way. Another way was to be connected magically and that seemed a bit simpler than the technological solution. I just needed to be connected to her during my mana rebirth.

  One thing was unfortunately true—I was going to have to get a job. Running a ship was not going to be cheap.

  This was still somewhat hard to process. What I expected was an empty universe where I could just go to any solar system, get the resources I wanted, perhaps try a few hundred systems before I found a pleasant and livable world, and just set up a nice life there.

  That was now literally impossible because if there was such a place that I could actually go without breaking universal law, it would already be occupied.

  Well, that wasn't strictly true, but it would be damn hard to do, as so many took scouting jobs. And while a lot of space wasn’t colonized, almost all of it was still known. The flags, so to say, have already been planted, marking who owned what.

  The political situation was different from galaxy to galaxy, but only a few seemed to have mega-nations that owned everything. Most seemed to be made up of tens of thousands of nations, mostly no bigger than a few solar systems. What form of government those nations had was as varied—some I hadn’t even heard about.

  A lot of solar systems simply weren’t accessible because of universal law and the side dimension currents making normal FTL travel too unviable.

  Everything was also a lot more dangerous. Currently, this ship of mine was nothing more than a tin can that could be crushed by basically anything flying up here.

  They actually had standard classifications for ship sizes.

  A tiny ship was anything up to 100 meters in length, 50 meters across, and 35 meters tall. Then came two classifications for small, four for medium and four for large. The largest being up to 8000 meters long. There were even classifications beyond that, but already before that ships were ridiculously big.

  My ship was even tiny in the tiny classification. That was a big problem that I will hopefully have a way to fix.

  Then, of course, there was the armor most other ships had, that made mine look like wood paneling. There seemed to be three types of shields that defended against different types of weapons. Battles seemed complicated, and everything cost so much.

  At least on that front, I was not poor. I had plenty of materials I could sell to get universal money called Mana Credits, or MC. Lola didn’t have much information on that, but it seems that everything in the universe had an evaluation of how many mana credits it was worth.

  For example, one gram of gold is worth 10 mana credits. The prices of everything fluctuate as in any market with supply and demand but this seemed like a good reference list for what something should cost.

  There was also no universal banking. While every nation and organization had their own currency most spacers used barter of valuable metals as a currency.

  The funny thing is, Lola hasn’t actually found our galaxy. We don’t even know the name of it, so it’s harder to locate. There’s no search function in the quantum net, so you just have to go through everything to find something.

  Most likely, I was going to have to become an adventurer. They had a lot more freedom to move about and could basically do any job—from delivery to mercenary work—or, what they mostly did, fight giant space monsters that otherwise threatened the existence of any civilization.

  Finally, one of the prints finished, and I could stop thinking about all of this and just work.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  For the new PC, there weren’t many parts to connect. Everything was printed out with solid connections that were mostly made of silver. I just needed to do a bit of overall assembly. When I was about to start working on the new keyboard, I was notified that the nanomachines were finally finished.

  A smile came to my face. It was one more step toward getting free of these unwanted cybernetics.

  I went to the hydroponics to make a shake and added the nanomachines into it. I downed everything in one go. Then I decided to relax a bit. I had already learned what overworking does, and I didn’t want to go to that place again.

  It was hard to take a bit of time off because the nanomachines were already doing their work. Every once in a while, there was another notification, meaning they had found something else wrong. I could see my legs starting to pounce—I did not enjoy that sound right now.

  “Lola, please quiet those notifications and keep an eye on what they find, but don't tell me unless you deem it necessary.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  It would be hard not to think about stuff, so maybe a game. I really didn’t have the energy to play a computer game, but I wanted to do something that would take my mind off things. That reminded me that I was in zero gravity. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan.

  So, I went to the third deck. In one cabinet I found what I was looking for—a deck of cards. Playing solitaire while trying to keep the cards in place and floating—that sounded like an interesting challenge.

  It was more fun than I expected. Without Lola's help, I actually would have completely lost one of the cards. It was super hard to keep them in the correct position, but eventually, I managed and actually finished a winning game.

  Looking at the timer, there were still a few minutes before the print finished, so I guess it’s back to work.

  It was quite fun programming all the chips and then finishing the assembly of the new quantum PC. A thought occurred to me—perhaps I should steal this keyboard and give Lola the old one.

  But no, the new one was a lot better, and she needed as much stability as possible if we wanted to continue gathering as much information as possible and hopefully finally find where we actually were.

  That way, we could get some credible locations so we could more likely buy some fuel to keep flying.

  That reminded me of the bartering system. I checked the feedstocks and found that I had used up quite a lot of precious metals for the nanomachines and the rest of the builds.

  Now, the printer could use just regular metal without it having to be feedstock, but it would also be a lot slower. Unfortunately, to make feedstock, you needed quite a big and cumbersome machine, and I simply didn’t have room to bring it.

  In fact, I didn’t have that much room at all. That needed to be fixed as soon as possible. Otherwise, my profit margins would be so low that I wouldn’t think I could keep flying.

  Of course, I had quite a lot of value on this ship that I could sell. In fact, I might be able to get myself quite a nice life in one of the more stable nations—if there even were any stable nations in this galaxy. While it might be nice to live a normal life the adventure of it all—space travel, building and understanding new technology, exploring the universe and of course magic—was starting to sound more and more inviting.

  As I was putting the finishing touches on improving the quantum PC, Lola spoke up.

  “I found out that for docking procedures and overall communication with stations and systems, while the quantum transporter is necessary for basic identification and location tracking, there seems to be a lot more to it. And this would require a proper modern PC. Just look at the specs and the necessary programs listed.”

  “Display them on the screen near the nano printers.”

  It took me a moment to finish my current task, then I headed a few steps toward the bigger screen that would allow me to see everything a bit better.

  It did look like we would need a modern computer. It would have advanced communications, some Wi-Fi system I didn’t even know existed but I should be able to build. Handshake programs, autopilot guides to visually show what flight path to use when docking—the list of programs was quite large, even some to handle finances.

  “So this PC also acts like my bank terminal, with my credentials allowing access to accounts I have with different nations and organizations if I had used and deposited some mana credits there. Is that correct?”

  “That seems to be the case. It's like a universal identifier, bank card, and communication array. Basically, it's needed to do anything with anyone. I don’t know everything we need just yet. The current quantum PC keeps crashing.”

  “You should have a better one in, like, literally minutes. It also seems like this is something we need to build. While we could save some time and resources and just add some of these parts and programs to the ship computer, I think that would create too many vulnerabilities. Better to be safe than sorry.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  And as I said, in a few minutes, I was finished.

  Now came the question of where to set it up. I guess the best place would be next to the computer core, which was on the third floor near the back of the ship. Fortunately, it wouldn’t be hard to get this heavy thing there because we were in zero gravity. Still, there was a need to be extremely careful.

  Eventually, I got it up there, past the ladders, past my sleeping quarters. I guess I will clear out one of these cabins so I can secure it properly, making sure even high-gravity maneuvers wouldn’t move it.

  It took me two hours to finish installing and testing it in a way that I was satisfied with, and that Lola could continuously use. As I closed the cabin and turned around, I saw stuff that used to be in the cabin floating about.

  “Now, where the hell am I going to put you all?”

  Thirty minutes later

  “Lola, your priorities are to figure out the complete sweep of programs and other things required for successful docking and communication with civilized space.”

  “Also, work on my cybernetics, as the nanomachines should already be getting proper scans of everything. At the minimum, we should be able to make a copy, but hopefully, we can combine it with other data we have to make some improvements.”

  "I will work on making the quantum transponder. Starting to build a new PC to allow us to communicate properly, a universal translator—something that would hopefully allow me to go through mana rebirth so I could become an adventurer, which is probably something we should do as fast as possible.”

  “Lola, could you also put together a quick program so I could start learning the universal standard language that the homepage contained? It will most likely be a good idea to know how to communicate even if I don’t have access to a universal translator."

  "Acknowledged, and a good idea. I will get that language learning software finished immediately."