Keeping on with this, apparently.
…
The Future, Stillborn
The Enrico Fermi’s FTL drive was barely up to the challenge of reaching Alpha Centauri. The ship’s engineers were pessimistic about the drive ability to make it back to Earth, but the consensus was that it wouldn’t matter. Surely the Amalgamation would at least assist them with tools, raw materials, or better theoretical models. Or maybe they’d just give humanity a new ship entirely, as a reward and/or teaching opportunity. It wasn’t an absurd notion, really. What information humanity had gleaned from the Pluto Monolith suggested that there would be an extensive period of cultural and technological uplift before Earth could join the Amalgamation. Giving humans trainer starships was a perfectly sensible training strategy.
Arriving in the charnel desolation of Alpha Centauri thus acted as a double blow. Not only was there no Amalgamation to greet its newest species; there was no Amalgamation to help put the Enrico Fermi back in good enough shape to get back home. The crew would have to do everything themselves, using whatever they could scrounge and adapt.
It took them six months of frantic effort, and the deaths of fifteen percent of the crew from various misadventures and accidents, to be in a position where the Enrico Fermi had an acceptable chance of success. The crew members not directly involved in repairing and refurbishing the ship’s systems fanned out into the half-wrecked space station that was supposed to be their welcoming facility. They were under orders to grab… everything that looked useful, or even half-comprehensible. Many of the crew casualties came from that frantic time of meddling with things humanity could not understand, or from simple mistakes brought on from too much work, not enough sleep, and only barely acceptable air.
But they managed. It helped a good deal that the Enrico Fermi was able to activate the pseudo-sapient uplift facilitator that humanity would later call ‘The Process.’ That gave the crew access to various FTL drive blueprints and schematics. They couldn’t recreate them, but even a basic idea of what the design could look like allowed them to simplify their own ship’s drive.
More importantly, that gave them The Process itself, which undoubtedly saved the expedition. Once activated, The Process was assisting the Enrico Fermi within an hour, providing what codes and protocols it could, offering suggestions and shortcuts that dramatically reduced the refurbishing period. A node of The Process was even integrated with the ship itself, which allowed it to avert disaster at least once on the trip back.
But, beyond a certain level, The Process could not help humanity make sense of the enigmatic devices and materials that had been stuffed in every spare cubic inch of the Enrico Fermi. Some of it, it could not talk about; most of it was far beyond The Process’s own operational limits. Deciphering their mysteries would have to wait upon the savants of Earth.
