Rebooted

Nobody had seen Gomez in a few days. With the engineering crew having fixed most of the damage Blue Dwarf had procured during it's exile in deep space, and with any real formal chain of command being virtually non-existant, he'd decided to head down to the safer engineering decks and carry out a personal inspection. He'd not been aboard the ship long before he'd been hurried into a stasis booth and flung to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and therefore had not really had much of a chance to get to know the inner workings of the ship properly. The months since his revival from stasis had also not provided much of a respite - being chased, threatened, beaten up and shot at hadn't give him much room for leisure. Nor did having to spend several days in the more uninteresting parts of the ship, like the garbage pod loading bays and taking care of the internal plumbing system. Having to unblock several hundred toilets filled with fossilized bodily waste had not been fun. It also didn't help that proper maintenance staff were short on the ground. Many had died in Blue Dwarf's initial nuclear accident and many others had since given up their lowly, underpaid positions and taken jobs in Blue Dwarf's slowly rebuilding promenade and criminal enterprises. What the ship needed, he thought, was a sanitation droid or two. But where could he find one? The maintenance department currently consisted of three reprobates who were too lazy and too stupid to leave their posts, a packet of three million year old j-cloths and half a bottle of Toilet Duck. The answer he found literally knocked him off his feet.
Something had grabbed his ankle and he recoiled in terror. Backing up against the wall, brandishing his wrench as an impromptu weapon, he cast his gaze upon the floor at his would be attacker. Lying flat on the ground was the upper half of a dead Simulant. It's lifeless eyes gazed up at the ceiling, its left hand clenching and unclenching in an automatic reaction. He nudged the torso with his foot and confirmed the Simulant was well and truly dead. An idea crept slowly into his mind. He was sure that there were a few mechanical body parts lying around the ship, and he knew enough about electronics to put the droid back together again. Picking up the body, he moved back towards the Xpress Lift and the Maintenance Bay.
Wiping away the grease on his hands with a rag of cloth, Gomez looked on at the repaired Simulant and smiled. Given his limited resources, he hadn't done too bad of a job. He'd found the droids' right leg a little further on down the corridor from where he'd discovered the torso, and he'd found a spare left leg from a Series 4000 mechanoid in the Maintenance Bay. He had connected up the wiring between the torso and the legs and made repairs to the body, in theory making it as good as new. Now it was time for the tricky bit. Normally, if he was to reactivate the Simulant, it would quickly murder him in a burst of enraged violence. But Gomez had had another idea. He connected up a cable to a socket located on the Simulants mechanical eye piece and placed the other end of the cable into an identical socket on a computer unit on the workbench next to the Simulants body. He booted up the DataDoctor program and began to make repairs to the Simulants psychotic personality flaws. He toned down the droids anger, reset its temper and removed its program to kill any and all Humans on sight. He also managed to install a cleaning program giving it a devotion to maintenance and sanitation. However, he failed to notice a small part of its CPU containing a program labeled 'Wakeup'. It was a carefully hidden program, installed in the mind of a Simulant by a black market cyberneticist on one of the many frontier worlds he'd pillaged many centuries before. It was designed for emergency situations where, if the Simulant had been deactivated or shutdown for any reason, to send the droid into a murderous frenzy for a full unstoppable minute after its awakening. It gave him an edge in brawls, meaning if he was knocked out and rebooted, he wouldn't be as deorientated like most other Simulants are for the first minute or so after their awakening.
Gomez was ready to go. He begun the boot up checks and noticed they were all registering green. Good. The Simulant was ready for reactivation. Disconnecting the cables and hitting the on the switch nestled amongst the circuitry of its eyepiece. The droid whirred and clicked, as its rusty circuits came to life. Slowly, its eye opened and glowed red. Gomez smiled down at it.
"Good morning. Can you 'ear me?" he asked the Simulant.
The Simulant stared back at him. Gomez went to tap him on the shoulder, but the droid smacked his hand away.

"uman! filthy 'uman!!" it growled in a deep, menacing voice. Before Gomez could react, the Simulant drove his fist into Gomez's face with the force of a wrecking ball. Gomez flew back and whacked his head violently against a glass cabinet, blood and glass flying in all directions. The Simulant jumped off the table and moved towards his prey. It then felt a surge run through its circuitry and it froze. A minute had passed and the 'Wakeup' program had ended. Now, its CPU was rebooting with the new programming Gomez had installed in him. Suddenly, his hatred for Humans disappeared and was replaced with a sense of complete, begrudging loyalty. Gomez had done an alright job - the Simulant still retained his lust for violence and destruction, but never again would he rip a Human's head off and wear it as a fancy hat just for looking at him funny.
He picked up the body of the Human who had returned him to life. Regret poured through all his circuits as he quickly realised the man was dead, his head caved in from the impact against the cabinet. He gently placed the body on the table and closed its eyes.
"Freeze right there, no sudden moves!" came an American accented voice behind him. He turned slowly and noticed a boy, no older than eighteen, aiming a laser pistol at his head. Judging by his ill fitting uniform, he was a security officer aboard this ship.
"My weapons are on the bench over there, Human sc... Master" he said to the boy in his deep growl of a voice. His latent programming forcing him to address the boy as Master.
The security officer looked over at the work bench where an array of knives, grenades and guns had been laid out by the recently deceased.
"OK, well, you've got five seconds to explain the body and just who the Smeg you are." said the boy, tightening the grip on his gun.
The Simulant took out a small cigar from the pocket of his long, gelfskin coat and stuck it in his mouth. Using a lighter built into his right thumb.
"The body is the 'uman what repaired me. My name is Garr Bedge... I'm 'ere to serve ya."

<To Be Continued>