Challenge #01555-D094: What the Hell, it Goes!
It's often held together with paper clips, wire coat hangers and duct tape. But it will last 'long enough' and get you to where you are going safe and sound. -- Knitnan
Unriddling a kludge is half the problem. Engineering a permanent solution that works as well as the kludge is nigh impossible. Desperation makes truly bizarre engineering. Rael, who had spent some time with actual engineers, thought he was getting pretty good at translating kludges to semi-proper engineering that did the job without so much ductape causing so many unexpected heat issues.
And, as a semi-bonus, he could shape himself to fit any tight area. Though he preferred not to. Shapeshifting was a caloric budget that many couldn't afford. He usually satisfied himself with absorbing his bones as a matter of comfort, and re-forming them as movement deemed necessary.
This job, in the depths of some of the older parts of Topsy Turvy Town[1], was a space squeezed between ancient ruptures of two compromised interstellar vessels. Rael had already taken as many panels off as he could, but some of the resultant mess was clearly infrastructure. Leaving them off meant that the next person in here would have a slightly easier time of moving about. And he could possibly claim mass credit on the neglected metal. In addition to the cramped conditions, this kludge-work consisted of coathangers, paperclips, ductape, and seemingly random circuit boards. And decaying hot glue.
Knowing what it did was half the battle. Rael made a new board, with resistors in the place of the coathanger wire, and put it in parallel before testing it. Always a wise move. For all he knew, a human could have made this mess... and they had a unique relationship with reality, physics, and how things should work properly.
So far, so good. Rael spliced in his improvement and cut the connections to the old one. Failure. Rael steadied himself and suspended his new creation on the twisted coathanger that held the old one. It worked. He added a little note to the coathanger in question that read, I need to be here until you can think of a better working method. He documented everything for the Archivaas and bagged up the old kludge for the local JOAT museum. Young JOATs could always learn from the mis-repairs of others.
Namely, that what was previously impossible could be actually possible. With enough ductape and coathangers,
[1] 'Up' being a relative concept in space, some sections of Amalgam Station got turned about before the gravity drives were properly installed. In the case of Topsy Turvy Town, all of the buildings are completely upside-down. As it is a tourist draw, the local inhabitants have just gone with the aesthetic. Including gravity-defying lighting.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / tobbef]
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