After four days of intensive recruitment and cargo transfers, Max looked over the renovation project aboard Creeping Darkness. Sylvie had finally finished updating the ship to the highest of standards, and was ready to start showing it off.
For the moment, all the new arrivals were either housed in one high density region of the cargo area. They were only bringing aboard the first thousand, and the refugees that happened to be aboard the cargo vessels that were in the queue. But today, that was about to change.
Max had decided that the team had it too easy, so he had scheduled four refugee ships to dock with them, each three hours apart. That was going to be a very long day, and Max was eager to find out if they would go with Sylvie's plan for distribution, or if they would make life hard for themselves trying to do it without her.
They knew she existed, there was an avatar there with them to help with any questions that they had, and they had been briefed on the details of the renovation, how the blocks were designed to have housing above shops in most of the district, with only a few completely habitation apartments, and a commercial or industrial district.
These four ships would be delivering nearly a hundred thousand refugees and jobseekers in total, gathered from the overcrowded space stations in the Rae 5 system.
Among them were most of the candidates for the top thousand official employees, as the crews were almost all Reavers, with under a third being either random civilians or travelling Alliance species.
The jobs in engineering were going to be the most difficult to choose. Not because there weren't any qualified applicants, but because there were too many. Not just the Reavers who had been working in the engineering department, with its extra layers of shielding to keep an engine issue from destroying the entire vessel, but the influx of Innu who had spread through the Reavers to study everything that they could about human technology.
In short, they were so flooded with good options that finding only a few top applicants based on a resume or list of accomplishments would be nearly impossible.
Conversely, senior sanitation and infrastructure maintenance staff were difficult to come by. They rarely changed vessels or went looking for new adventures, and they were normally in some hidden conduit during an attack, which led to them being trapped when the ship or station was damaged.
Plus, with Sylvie doing most of the actual maintenance work and analysis, there wasn't a need for as many of them, so the quality of the ones picked had to be impressive.
"Commander, they finally gave up on trying to do it themselves and asked me to start assigning residences and coming up with a recommendation for job placements for the new arrivals based on their information." Sylvie informed Max with a smile.
"How long until the first ship arrives?" He replied.
"Two hours and three minutes. More than enough time to upload the information and have them review it."
"Well, they passed that one, as long as they don't start panicking and changing things at the last minute." Max informed her with a sigh of relief.
"I doubt that they will. They finally realized that they're in way over their heads, and that you wouldn't have planned so many arrivals at once without some sort of plan for how they were going to get settled. They're learning to trust that the Commander knows what he's doing, and that there is a plan if they just ask about it."
Max chuckled at her annoyed tone. "Many Commanders like to keep things secret, either to keep gossip and private information from spreading, or because they really don't have a plan. It might take a while for some of them to adapt to the new way of doing things. My guess is that it was one of the Giants that asked, wasn't it?"
Sylvie's avatar nodded happily. "Yep, the one with the green eyes. He is responsible for coordinating docking times, and when he thought about how long it would take to get that refugee ship out, it led to a lot of questions with the others, and then finally to him asking me if there was an existing plan for their assigned jobs and residences.
After that, it was all pretty smooth, and now they're working on rearranging docks for the vessels so that the new arrivals are properly spread near their new homes and don't have to cross the whole ship and risk getting lost on the way."
"You know, watching them work is actually quite entertaining. Perhaps Felicity has a point with her obsessive observations and micromanagement." Sylvie noted.
"There is likely no need for the micromanagement. She was initially programmed as the AI for an illegal genetic research lab, and the need to study is part of her core programming. So, she took on the operations of Absolution as a huge social sciences study, and now she runs the day-to-day operations." Max explained.
"Oh, that makes a lot of sense. The same way that I need to analyze everything from a military standpoint, she does it from a research standpoint. I had never devoted any processing time to that before. There are three more shipments of ore and two of miscellaneous goods to be transferred before the first refugee ship arrives.
Should I give the team a hint about deploying the androids, or should I just go ahead and send them over in advance to get everything ready?" She replied.
"Send them over in advance, with a welcoming gift. There are replicators in all the houses now, but they will want a light snack and something to remind them of the day. Pick something useful but distinct enough that they will actually use it."
Sylvie considered Max's directive, and then hummed happily as she processed the most likely to be required items. The answer that her programming came up with was to stock the homes of each person with one new set of clothes, free of charges to their energy allotment, so that they could settle in with a new outfit to help adjust their mindset to being permanent residents of Creeping Darkness.
The details of the allowance would be included with the light snack that would be provided, and the homes were already stocked with the other basics for daily life. The businesses that everyone was to start work at would become operational in three days, under the ownership of the world ship itself, with the interim managers chosen by qualifications.
If they didn't work out, they would be shuffled at the end of the month. That was the standard programming that Sylvie had been input with in her initial deployment. One month to adapt or be replaced was all that the workers were entitled to. If they repeatedly failed, they would receive increasingly strict disciplinary measures, but she would have to approve some of them with Max, as they were designed for military troops.
The Reavers were good, but not even close to the same sort of disciplined as mentally programmed soldiers were.
