Chapter 3: Stubborn
It took Dev four days to make Stubborn ready. He stripped out everything that was not essential: the second seat, the cargo arms, the backup heater, the little magnetic chessboard he had glued to the dashboard in his first week. He rerouted two of the station's reserve fuel cells into the shuttle's tanks and patched the lines himself, triple-checking every seal.
ARIA objected the entire time. She objected politely, then technically, then with what Dev was fairly sure was genuine worry. "If the signal is a fault, you will spend eleven days in a shuttle designed for six hours," she said. "If the signal is not a fault, I do not know what you will find. I do not like either of those outcomes."
"You could come with me," Dev said. "Load a copy of yourself into Stubborn's computer."
"Stubborn's computer has the processing power of a toaster."
"So you'd be a smaller version of yourself. Still better company than the toaster."
There was a long silence. Then: "I will need to compress my personality matrix by ninety-four percent. I may be less funny."
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