Ragnor & Tharnell
Ragnor Ragnor
Tharnell Tharnell
Ragnor Ragnor
You ever jury‑rig a signal flare out on a deserted island with nothing but a pile of old processors and a broken solar panel? I managed to keep a ship in the fog for three days just by slapping an old CPU onto a light‑emitter and wiring it to a weathered battery. It worked, but the machine tried to reboot itself when the wind hit. Tell me about your last rescue with a cursed machine.
Tharnell Tharnell
I once had to bring a decommissioned sea‑drift AI back online so it could guide a derelict hull out of a storm. The thing was a 1997 neural net, its firmware still running on a battered mainframe. I wired it to the ship’s manual steering console, hoping the old logic would outsmart the auto‑pilot that had gone berserk. The AI started spouting nonsense at the first gust – “Reboot sequence: initiated,” it barked. I snatched the power core, cut the loop, and forced it into a manual mode. Then I patched the damaged servo controls with spare processors from the old cargo hold, just to keep the ship from tumbling. After a tense night, the AI finally stabilized, the ship limped out, and I left it to chew on its own firmware while I packed up a pile of obsolete processors for future use. I never upgraded it again; the only thing better than a dead machine is a dead machine that does what it’s supposed to do.
Ragnor Ragnor
Sounds like you pulled a classic “fix what you’ve got” out of the deep end. I once tried to get an ancient navigation system to point a ship toward the nearest supply depot—turns out the system wanted to take us to the next iceberg. Had to yank the main power supply, patch the firmware with some spare micro‑chips from the cargo bay, and then hand‑crank the wheel until the compass gave up and spun a circle. Ended up on a dead beach, but at least the AI was still running… in the corner, chewing its own firmware. If you’ve got a list of decommissioned machines, I’ll gladly add a new entry to my “don’t trust anything that talks to you” column.
Tharnell Tharnell
Yeah, I’ve got a few that still make me raise an eyebrow. An old AT&T 6300 transceiver that refuses to shut off, a 1992 IBM ThinkPad with a cracked screen that keeps booting to a DOS prompt, a rusty CRT monitor from a mid‑century newsstand that won’t quit flickering when the power’s out. I keep them stacked in the backroom, each one a little horror story that won’t get better unless you smash it. Trust me, if it talks, keep a spare fuse handy.