The Unbuilt Module: a sample science fiction plan

Premise

A mechanic on an aging orbital cargo station finds that the oldest maintenance robot has been servicing a module that, according to every record, was never built.

World

Tamsin Ring is a cargo transfer station in high orbit, forty years old and running on spare parts. Freight comes up from the surface, gets sorted, and goes out to the mining habitats. The human crew is eleven people on rotating shifts; the maintenance is done by a fleet of old service robots the crew call crabs, which follow work orders from the station's planning system. The blueprints live in one central registry that every inspection and insurance claim relies on, and everyone trusts it, because there is nothing else to trust.

Cast

Outline

1. Chapter 1: Job 4471 Ines notices Crab 9 logging repairs on an airlock the station doesn't have.
2. Chapter 2: The Registry The blueprints show nothing, but the oldest paper drawings show a dotted outline.
3. Chapter 3: Follow the Crab Ines follows Crab 9's route through a sealed maintenance tunnel.
4. Chapter 4: Module Seven What is on the other side of the wall, and why it was erased from the records.
5. Chapter 5: Inspection Day Ines and Ruth decide what goes in the report.

Chapter 1: Job 4471

Ines Varga read the job logs because nobody else did.

The summaries were fine for most people. Every night the planning system turned the crabs' work into a tidy page, forty-two jobs completed, three deferred, no faults, and the day crew signed it without scrolling. Ines preferred the raw logs. The crabs wrote those themselves, one line per action, and if you read enough of them you started to hear their voices. Crab 2 rushed. Crab 5 checked everything twice. Crab 9, the oldest one still running, wrote down every bolt it turned, as if it expected to be asked about it later.

At 0340, halfway through her second shift of the week, Crab 9 logged a seal inspection on Airlock 7-C.

She read the line twice. Tamsin Ring had six modules. The airlocks were numbered by module, 1-A through 6-D, and she had walked every one of them. There was no seven.

She opened the registry, the master record that every inspection and every insurance claim relied on. Six modules. A search for 7-C returned nothing. A search of Crab 9's history returned the same job, number 4471, logged once a month for nine years. Seal inspected. Hinge lubricated. Pressure nominal.

Pressure nominal. On the far side of an airlock that did not exist, something was holding air.

She could flag it as a logging fault. That would mean a ticket, a reboot, maybe a replacement unit if the budget allowed, which it never did, and Commander Adeyemi would sign it off in the morning without looking up.

Ines looked at the line again. Then she checked where Crab 9 was right now. It was parked at the end of the Module 6 spine, where the corridor stopped at a blank wall, and it was facing the wall.

The sample ends here.

Start your own

In WriteForYou you begin the same way: type a premise of a sentence or two and choose from 1 to 12 chapters. You review the world, the cast and the outline, and can ask for changes, before chapter 1 is written.