She thought it needed some kind of triumphant moment, but there was nothing. The silence, broken only by the sound of her fellow mechanics as they tinkered with their pieces, coughed, or muttered something under their breaths, was deafening.
This auspicious moment deserved something a little more dramatic, she thought but had to accept the anonymity of her triumph. The only applause was the thudding in her chest and she struggled to believe she had actually done it.
Worse, there was no one to celebrate it with. Well, yet. That would have to wait until she actually plugged the finished corrections into the processor that was supposed to fully repair the AI core.
In theory, she reminded herself. There were only so many things that could be accounted for in a simulation, and Jessica13 almost couldn't stand the fact that she had to wait until she was on her own time to get it running again.
Wait, why did she need to wait to be on her own time? She called the Minato her mech, but it did belong to Sanctuary, after all. Anything she did to improve it was action taken to improve the lives of everyone in Sanctuary by association.
Hastily, she stood from her desk and looked around at her coworkers. They were deeply immersed in their work and made not even so much as a sound of protest as she moved away from the place where she had worked for the past few hours. Her muscles told her how long it had been, and she was only able to move again after a luxurious stretch and a stifled yawn and blood began to pump through her sore muscles once more.
After another hasty glance at her coworkers, she strolled casually to her mech, still fiddling with the headset she had worked from. Excitement began to build in the pit of her stomach and she felt oddly twitchy—like her brain tried to find something that could go wrong before she plugged anything in.
But no, there was no way anything would go boom. Nothing could break the mech any more than it was already. The processor plugged into the AI core was already not used by anything else. If anything broke there, it wasn't like she would lose any of the functionality of the mech.
"Nothing will go wrong," Jessica13 told herself firmly as she pulled the chest of the Minato open to provide access to the control that would open the back. "You're that good. Nothing will go wrong, right?"
No cheerful chirp emitted from the broken Mini AI. Nothing that she could hear, anyway, as she climbed onto the back and used the harness for support to stretch in to find the processors that did most of the translating from commands into action by the mech.
Even though the Mini was supposedly one of the simpler designs, there was still a mess of wires for her to negotiate as she pushed deeper into the back.
"Nope, still going to need the life support," she said, talking to herself for reassurance while she navigated the electronics until she found what she was looking for. It was one of the least used processors in the suit. She had left it in and kept it in place as she hadn’t wanted to risk losing access to the AI core entirely. A part of her had known and hoped this day would eventually come.
"Don't let me down now, you hear?" she whispered softly and disconnected the processor from anything that might misfire and cause her all kinds of trouble. Once everything was clear, she disconnected the wiring of the chip from her headset and plugged it into the processor.
In an instant, the lights lit up in a way they hadn't done in what Jessica13 assumed were centuries and made her grin like an idiot. She simply stared at them for a moment and watched the code she had labored over start to take effect. It seemed to work faultlessly to wipe the corrupted shit and replace it with everything it was supposed to be, straight out of the factory.
What it was doing was enough to catch the attention of a handful of pilots who had worked on their mechs over to the side. Whatever they were doing couldn't have been that interesting as they were quick to gather around. Three of them already waited at the foot of the Minato by the time she closed the back and clambered down herself.
"What do you think you're doing in there, bulletfoot?" one of them by the name of Becker3 asked. He tilted his head and tapped the Minato’s armor lightly. "I thought you would have all the repairs squared away by now. Isn't that what you were supposed to do down here while we were upstairs drilling our asses off?"
"Technically, I was supposed to adapt all of the pieces we picked off of the dead mechs up there," she replied. She was in too good a mood to be brought down by a chav in a flight suit who tried to talk her down. "But this isn't standard maintenance. I think I've finally managed to get the AI working again."
"Bullshit," he said with a chuckle. "Not nothing in the world, under or over, could get that damn thing working again."
"You know what you're looking at then?" Jessica13 asked as she pulled the chest open.
"What?"
"Nothing in the world, under or over," she said and flashed him a cheeky grin as she pushed herself into the control seat. She isolated all the controls and connected the headset before she closed the chest with her inside.
For a moment, all she could see was blackness and all she could hear was her own breathing—which came a little too rapidly for her taste. She always imagined herself being cool and collected when this day came, calmly and methodically gathering everything she needed and putting it all together.
But no, she was excited
