[color=ffaa00][center][h1]Echo Montegawitz[/h1][/center][/color]
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FREV-R (Force Resistance Enhanced Virtual-Reality) had hit the schools with the force of an asteroid impact. It was brand new in Echo’s father’s generation. A training that went beyond words, went beyond sounds, went beyond stereoscopic vision, and jumped straight to muscle memory. While clumsy and more of a novelty in the ritzy schools when it first came out, in a matter of decades FREV-R had grown up. It wasn’t sporadic, lazy, or antisocial any longer. It had matured into reliable, useful, and user-friendly. Not only that but inertia, temperature, and even smell had enhanced the FREV-Rs after the years to make it a full simulation.

However, the actual muscle memory learning that made trades and tech as well as fine arts learned at thousands of the pace of normal, the true game-changer was the content. Several billion sims had been recorded and written for FREV-R specifically for manufacturing, maintenance, and repair.

Couple that with self-repairing and maintaining systems, it took the “nician” out of “Technician.” Gradually titles such as electrician or mechanic evaporated from the industries. Engineers became more of designers than anything, especially with powerful computer programs resolving all of the math and calculations that would take a classical engineer dozens of years to calculate. The only true people that really had to know from the ground up were theoretical inventors (and these sorts of people were neither a reliable, nor accessible.)

So, when Echo accessed the control panel on each of the quarters, it was no surprise to see a lack of an engineer on board. FREV-R (in combination with the crew) [i]was[/i] the engineer, preparing them for any task that the self-repairing systems could not provide.

Echo found her quarters easy enough, the keypads were color coded to the individual and showed the registry number that Cryonautics entrusted for all computer and security access. You didn’t need to knock or randomly open doors, it listed the tenant and whether or not there was an occupant in the room or if they set their level to private. The chamber opened with a gasp, as the system awoke again. It was a room that Benji hadn’t been in for the better part of a year... probably because it was intrusive to sit in someone else’s room, and root through someone else’s things while they slept just down the hallway. No dust, and only a little cold. The lights flicked on, and properly entered into Day mode making the false windows display a slightly cloudy, slightly rainy day with a little wind rolling through the system causing the false sense that it was causing faux windows and roofs to shift at the gusts. She waved her hand and the performance shutdown promptly and return to a sterile environment.
[color=2b2b2b]I don’t want to be comforted right now[/color]
Echo changed her clothes quickly, and suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion roll over her. She plopped onto the bed, glancing around to see that whoever was stowing their belongings really didn’t take note of the feng shui that Echo preferred. Out of curiosity she began looking through what had been provided.
[color=2b2b2b]How could I be so blind! I barely packed anything because I wasn’t going to need it. I could have been exposed.[/color]
Most of her possessions were not what she brought. Rather, it was provided by her mother and sisters. It was rife with impracticality and upper crust. She wasn’t particularly partial to the formal ware, the personal luxuries, and the knickknacks that had joined her... but then again she wasn’t really all that much into free time since joining the program. There was a card left by her family, which she read and didn’t really say anything more than pride about her. She smiled and placed it in her nightstand.
[color=2b2b2b]Even to the very end, they didn’t say anywhere anything about love.[/color]
There was little black dress hung predominantly in the closet. A quandary rolled through her mind. Project Renaissance was probably the biggest, most expensive, most high-pressure, and probably the most successful speed date ever connived. There was Benji and Owen, both were tolerable. Andrew and Blake didn’t seem to make the cut and both seemed linger with their eyes upon Echo at meetings and training sessions. Beyond that she had no clue who the third man was.

[color=ffaa00]“Mother,”[/color] she grumbled to the past, and promptly stuck the dress to the back of her wardrobe. Now was not the time for romance, without a stable food supply or a stable location nobody had better wind up with a bun in the oven any time soon.

However, upon moving her garments aside, she noticed a few boxes that were disheveled. Furthermore, there was a number of divots out of her closet hatch. Upon closer inspection, she identified them easily as the movies and entertainment loved to show, laser burns. Places where the metal had been heated to the boiling point in moments as they roasted their way through someone. Hurriedly, she opened the rest of her closet shoving out her belongings and rifling through them. She found a device of crude construction well hidden. It looked like a bomb. She grabbed it, which was probably the dumbest thing in the world to do, but she did it anyway. Then, she proceeded to find the nearest diagnostics station in order to assess the device. There was absolute fact that there was a firefight on the ship, and also that someone wanted at least one of the crew (if not all of them) dead.