Many days ago.......
Several Hundred Internal Processors was still legible on the worn out eye catch forever glued on the side of the, once mobile, atmosphere transport vehicle. It resembled 4 trailer park trailers stuck together 2 long and 2 wide, and used to be used as free public transportation for farmers to transport goods and themselves to and from the markets. They were an ugly shade of metal and gray, square everywhere, but, very roomy and easy to maintain. The public transportation empire would often decommission these beautiful creatures when the main engines would fail and explode in a spectacular show of fireworks and molten slag raining down. The maintenance bots in charge of this sky show would fail to recharge properly in their docks because work took priority over there replaceable lives, and so they would try to finish a daily task to completeness, forever. This sounds impossible to fail at, but, given you need water to clean, and if you turn the faucet on expecting water, and water never comes because the human dock workers forgot to hook the external feed lines to replenish the onboard tanks, then 'wait for the water to fill your bucket' becomes a death sentence to something without a consciousness or free will. There were so many of these transports that needed to pass human inspections, that when people fell behind on their quotas, the inspectors would just slap a sticker on the haul over the last one, and call it a day. The inspectors were later asked why the transports were suddenly so poorly maintained, and the inspectors would blame the bots’ batteries for malfunctioning and leaving them standing at the sinks. The public transport empire blamed the batteries and the concept of relying on bots to clean, so they decommissioned the bots and installed sprinkler systems to just flush out the transports every week or so. This plan didn't go without problems though. The number of filthy transports began to grow as the number of additional transports was created. The farmers noticed this odd trend forming and decided to form the Filthless Farmers Alliance. The farmers formed clean teams to go and purge the transports of their grime and restore beauty to this free, overused, transport system. This strategy succeeded, and harmony was restored to free public transport, but, in the wake of this success, lay graveyards of abandoned filthy transports, most still with the cleaning bot still standing in front of the sink waiting for the water, battery dead, abandoned forever.
The escape portal Dmitry had specifically chosen, led to the largest abandoned filthy transports storage facility. The plan was simple; re-power the abandoned cleaning bot, get'em cleaning and repairing again. The bot would naturally clean and repair the entire transport back into operational status again, and, if it would get stuck with either task, Dmitry could help it along. The sheer number of available transports guaranteed not only success, but, escape decoys as well. The facility was decently far from the main city and that granted us plenty of time to prepare and plan, and then depart. Dmitry worked quickly to restore power to the storage facility by harvesting a micro-NaCl reactor from one of the transports and carried it back to the storage facility's control room. There, Dmitry proceeded to tear off wall panel after wall panel in the room until he found the main building feed coming in from outside. Dmitry calmly and methodologically began building an amazingly colorful collection of spaghetti across the floor as he spliced and cut and pulled and swore to get every system powered and online. The micro-NaCl reactors were designed by farmers, for farmers; so they ran on salt blocks.
The facility had thousands of abandoned transports with plenty of abandoned cargo to go with them, finding a salt block, tools, freeze-dried food, books, literally anything that would of sold at the market was here, was easy. It was like the old holiday of XY-Mass, a time of unity, where for one night everyone wore red jumpsuits with ribbons and bows and said Ho-Ho-Ho at the stroke of midnight, then got drunk and played ping-pong long into the night. Dmitry finished his wonderful wiring art project and shoved a salt block into the reactor and shut the little hatch and turned it on. The sound of an entirely dead facility waking up is pretty humbling, I couldn't believe how everything still worked, I mean, even after unknown years of aging, the technology just started waking up to try again.
Dmitry looked for a chair to sit on and was unhappy to not find one. "Chair raiders, those dishonorable bastards, my @$$ needs a seat, is nothing sacred anymore." I heard Dmitry say. Dmitry grabbed the micro-NaCl reactor and dragged it closer to the control terminal to sit on. Dmitry sat in front of the terminal and waited for the mOScc to finish loading the facility's controllable sub-systems. The screen came up and asked for a login, Dmitry thought for a moment and then entered <REDACTED> for the username and for the password he entered 'Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined His existing OS was so blind He'd do better to pirate An OS that ran great But found his hardware declined. Please don't steal Mac OS Really, that's way uncool. (C) Apple Computer, Inc.' "Access Granted: Welcome Home Captain Bob” The terminal said. Dmitry smiled. "The Old Man's login still works, I owe him a beer." Dmitry quietly said out loud to himself.
Dmitry proceeded to access inventories of the facility's stored transports; each one was numbered and readily accessible. "I found them, the Deloreans my father built; we can use them to get back to the city." Dmitry muttered. "Oh, what's this?" Dmitry leaned closer to the terminal screen. "Cargo Origin: Unknown. Cargo Description: 'anything is fine, just don't put Infini-ARM in that description field'" Dmitry laughed and then looked over at me and said, "I found a replacement arm for you my friend. Let's walk down to aisle 359 together, transport #8; I'm sure this will be worth both our whiles."