Steel Jungle

They had been back for two days. In theory, they'd been gone for less, considering it was time travel. Yet still, the ship felt like it had gone without a service for decades.

"Who am I kidding?" Jamie said, as he flopped out on his back.

"Holly?" He said, turning his head to face the nearest monitor, where the disembodied head appeared.

"yo dude. Sup?" Holly replied, in his overly casual way.

"Set up a waiting list for me, would you? Let everyone know that if they have an engineering problem to log it in the list, and I'll get to it when I can." He said. "I think I'm the only one here qualified to repair the ship."

"No worries." Holly said, and vanished.

Jamie took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly. Sitting up again, he looked up at the towering machinery in front of him. This was the engine room. Fresh out of the space dock, this place would have been full of people making minor repairs, doing preventative maintenance and keeping each other sane.

He closed his eyes, and barely moved for a moment, until a pipe burst. His one single moment of the day for rest, shattered in an instant. The pipe's contents sprayed onto the floor, sizzling as the superheated coolant returned to room temperature.

"Holly, divert coolant!" he called, getting up instantly, and pulling himself up the railings. The sheared pipework would be no problem for an engineering team, but as it was, he was alone.

"From a real jungle to a metal one. At least I can live in either." He said to himself, "Still, better here with other humans than on a jungle world with no technology."

"At least you've got me for company." Holly said, smugly.

"Thanks for the thought, but I don't think an AI counts as human contact."

"Three million years ago, there was a strip club on the promenade that you'd have loved." Holly said, for once getting something right. "Cass used to be a stripper there, back then."

"What?" Jamie said, doing a double-take. "I'd have paid to see that!"

Holly nodded, in that weird way only a disembodied head could do. "I'll tell her you said that, maybe she needs some money." Then he vanished.

"WAIT!" Jamie shouted, real fear in his eyes. "don't you dare tell her about this. She'd kill me!"

"I'm just yankin' yer chain!" Holly said, vanishing again.

"Just what I need... a crazy AI..." the lone engineer muttered under his breath.

Jamie finished sealing the pipe back into place, and reactivated the coolant flow before letting himself slide down to a seated position again, and trying to get some rest. For the past couple of days they'd been back, he'd been getting nothing more than naps as he tried to repair everything that was broken.

<tag to anyone who feels like wandering through engineering looking for someone to fix a problem... This post is more of a "what's going on this downtime" than actually doing stuff, but that can be fixed no problem.>