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The code flashed by on the screen in great chunks, as Urle uploaded the data from his internal server to the ship.
“I am surprised you still remember all the code,” Decinus said, looking rather awed.
“It’s easy when you have a disk drive in your head,” he told the man with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t say I remember it the way we remember names or paths we commonly walk. It’s just . . . stored up there.”
He saw the look Decinus gave him, studying his head, wondering just what it might look like inside Urle’s mind. Not everyone was prepared to accept giving up parts of their own bodies for self-improvement.
Urle had never really felt that attached to his meat.
“You are certain that this will not interfere with our proper emergence from zerospace?” Guona Daa asked, hovering around like a concerned mother.
Which, she might be a mother, Urle thought, having to force himself to look past the fact that she was around the same height as Hannah, with a smooth enough face to look young. All Sepht had a youthfulness about them, especially Vem Em, even when they were well over a hundred. And they had children almost as soon as they reached adulthood, their eggs only needing fertilization every three or four generations.
“It has no appreciable effect on any craft,” Urle assured her. “I was deeply involved in this project, and it was only scrapped because the use-case is so uncommon.” Well, and people tended to get a little concerned about messing with their zerodrive, much like Daa was right now.
“Now,” he continued, “I’m going to need a few minutes to adapt this to your system, Captain. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
He plunged into the ship’s library code that dealt with heavy power switching and zero-drive core control loops. The Sapient Union’s Information Security and Standardization Committee required all naval system code to be written in the Iota language and be available to all engineers onboard with proper clearance. Urle knew Iota, but digging into Sepht code wasn’t easy – while they technically obeyed the requirements, their code was a mess of higher-level Iota mixed with chunks of opcodes specific to their processor cores that were yet to get included in the official compiler specifications. All in the name of efficiency. It seemed like squeezing just a couple more cycles from their CPUs was a kind of sport for them.
“What the . . . ?” Urle barely bit that one back.
Of course they invented a fancy macro name to replace all literals of the number three in the code – it was considered a very unlucky number, and four was considered even worse, making its references even more difficult.
Vem em programmers always took their work too seriously in his opinion. This was just some virtual text that would get gobbled up by the compiler after all, but they still put just a little bit of their tradition into it anyway.
Urle fired the compiler up, observed the lack of any warnings or errors from the integration system, ran it five more times just to be safe, then took a deep breath and exhaled. It was ready.
“All right,” he said, turning to N’Keeea. “Whenever you are ready, Ambassador.”
Other Terrestrial 
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