Chapter 5 - Life After Death

When we got up the next morning we proved that the sleep-training worked. I used the bathroom and got out, then while Diana was in there I proved that I could get my coffee and donuts from the replicator, all without having to either stop and figure out how things worked or even ask for help. I was just realizing that I could probably function without the coffee when Diana came out, and we had breakfast - scrambled eggs and sausage for me, over easy with toast for her, coffee and orange juice for both of us.

While we were eating breakfast, I asked the AI what our schedule was today; what were we supposed to be doing? It told us that we were to report to the Admiral for a briefing when we were ready. What? He's an Admiral. Isn't that "As Soon As Possible"? No, he's with some other people, so no sooner than 15 minutes and 30 would be better. Let's find out if the shower works for two. It did, and that could have led to other things, but we had a schedule to keep. I promised Diana that we'd look into that more later, when we had some time.

I was trying to put my new suit on, and having more trouble than I thought I should, when the AI said that that suit would no longer fit properly; there was a new one for each of us at the replicator. I threw the old one in the recycle slot. It was right. The new one fit better. I was wondering if there was a problem with the materials, did they only last one day? That was useless for a combat protection garment, but before I got around to demonstrating how stupid I was it occurred to me that maybe the problem was me. I was changing.

My mind was working far better than it normally did this early in the morning, and I realized that I didn't really need my second cup of coffee. I was just doing things from habit. If the Confederacy could cure caffeine addiction they truly were an advanced civilization that deserved protection, and the human race should get behind this war effort and start pushing. Maybe it's a little thing, but that's what convinced me that we were doing the right thing.

We were walking down one of the passageways when the thing that had bothered me yesterday came into focus. Either this passageway was spinning, or it was twisted, or something even weirder that I couldn't explain. We stopped at some hatches about in the middle, and I asked Diana to walk back to the end that we entered it from and stand at that hatch while I stayed there and watched.

Sure enough, I didn't feel like I was moving or anything. Diana was walking at an angle before long, and she was standing at a 45-degree angle when she turned around at the end hatch. I called for her to stay there, and I walked on to the far end of the passageway, where it entered the main ship's hull. Everything felt fine. But, when I turned around, Diana was standing on a wall, 90 degrees off from me.

I gestured for her to come on, and I watched her gradually change from walking on the wall to walking on the floor in front of me.

"That is disturbing. Do you know what is going on?"

"Well, we know that these people have artificial gravity, and I think we just proved that their version doesn't have to be flat. Hmmm. AI, can you show us a see-through drawing of this ship for us?"

We got a kind of half-drawing/half-model of the ship, with little people in it. The two of us were outlined in red. I waved my hands over my head, and the little Roger mimicked me.

"Neat! Okay, can you show the floor for the path we just took, from our pod to here?"

That was it. The ship had several decks, like any ship. We were on the middle deck, which appeared to be somewhat larger than the others above and below it. The main hull was a cylinder, just like a submarine, so yes the middle deck would be wider than the upper and lower decks. Sticking out from the main hull were spokes which connected to several rings like in an old science fiction movie, and there were pods attached to the outside of the rings.

The important thing at the moment was that the main hull had gravity "down" towards the lowest deck, but "down" for the rings was towards the stern of the ship, not in the direction "from the highest deck to the lowest deck". In order to make those two match, the "spoke" that we had just walked through to get from the ring to the main hull was twisted 90 degrees. Your inner ear might or might not notice, depending on how distracted you were, and you wouldn't be sure what was going on until you watched someone else walk it.

I'd be willing to bet that people like gymnasts who lived off a highly-trained sense of balance wouldn't like that walk. I was going to have to find a way to get a parakeet up here, just to see if they could fly down the corridor without going crazy.

Should I talk about the ship here? As big and complicated as it was, I got the impression from the sleep-training lesson that the Confederacy considered it to be just about the smallest, simplest, cheapest, and most economical ship possible. Anything else we met would be bigger, more complicated, more powerful, and cost more, both to build and to run.

Anyway, think of a toilet plunger. That's the main hull and the business end of the main engines. Now, poke a hole in the middle of a round bath sponge -a loofa- and cram it all the way down until it's mashed up against the plunger. That's the engineroom, fuel tanks, and other important stuff. Next, drop three space-station rings down the plunger handle, but space them out some from the sponge and each other. Each ring has cargo pods attached around the circumference.

After that, find a child's bath ball, poke a hole in it, too, and shove it down to the middle of the handle. That was where everything was that wasn't in the engineroom. Control room, crew berthing, hydroponics tanks, in-use storerooms, shuttle bays, everything that wasn't cargo or engines.

Last, drop three more rings with pods onto the handle -don't forget to space them out some- and top the handle off with a little cap. That was a passenger lounge with huge picture window, forward docking point and emergency conning station, kinda like the one on a submarine's sail.

The only time you would use the forward conning station was if you were docking nose-first to something and you wanted to actually see what you were doing. Or if something had happened to the main control station, of course, whispered my naval engineering background in the back of my mind. I whispered back that I couldn't argue the point.

When we walked into the conference room -I was pretty sure I'd been in this one before, now that I knew my way around- I opened with "We're not dead yet. We can go home if we want."

Of course the Admiral bit. "What do you mean?"

"Mr. Robinson said that if we didn't come back from fishing, we would be assumed lost at sea and eventually we would be declared dead without a body. However, we didn't go fishing. We were in our house and just hopped on his magic transporter pad. Our boat is still in our yard, isn't it? Right beside our garage? Aren't our cars still home? How would anyone know we drowned? We can't be dead until after we take the boat fishing and some wreckage is found."

"Yes, but you're one of us now. You can't go home again."

"We can go home again, we just can't stay home. We're on board with this, we're coming back, but we've got to come up with a better story. If nothing changes, we're going to get added to that website of people who disappeared. Can we actually go fishing, and take one of those transporter pads with us? If we leave the truck and trailer at the ramp, that will tell people that there's still an 18-foot boat out there somewhere in the Bay. We'll get a receipt for the ramp fee and leave it on the dash and they will go looking and find the boat but no people. All we have to do is figure out how to get rid of the transporter pad."

The Admiral looked up. "AI? How can we recover or destroy the pad after it is used, if there is no one around to pick it up?"

<The transporter pad can be provided with nanites to disassemble it. All that will be found is some dust that cannot be identified with your technology.>

Diana, the Admiral, and I all started laughing. A ship or boat at sea always has dust and dirt everywhere. You can't get away from it. If nothing else, just the salt water spray leaves a rime when the water evaporates. Forget identifying the dust. No one would even notice a little bit of extra dust drifting around, on an abandoned fishing boat.

With that out of the way we moved on to more important stuff. Namely, my performance in bed last night. I asked Diana to cover her ears because I was going to say something that sounded disrespectful if you weren't one of the boys, then reported to the Admiral that those med-tubes appeared to do their job. I had my health back and I had fucked the SHIT outta that ho several times last night. Further, I was willing and able to do it again as soon as the opportunity, um, arose. I appeared to be fully functional again.

When I was done, I pulled Diana's arms away from her head and told her she could listen again. We all pretended that she didn't hear what I had said while her ears were covered.

I wanted to talk about how wonky walking the access tube felt, but I got immediately shouted down. Aside from Diana and me, they were unanimous. Don't say anything. These ships are wonderful. If you can't say anything nice, just don't say anything.

George-the-soldier waved for quiet, then asked the AI "Can you show Roger what we had two weeks ago? An interior view?"

Suddenly I was in a huge tank with curved sides. I wasn't on the bottom, I was on the side. Or, the tank was on its side and I was on the side that was on the bottom. I was on a walkway with equipment, cargo, and various unrecognizable stuff all around.

ALL around. There was stuff on all sides of the tank as the sides curved around up and overhead. There was stuff on the top of the tank, a hundred or more feet above me. In the very center there was a shaft of some kind.

And, my eyes were watering. The whole tank had 'grey' as the base color. Blue-grey, dark grey, light grey, with various colors mixed in and a lot of them hurt. No human did this, and no human could stand this for long even though Diana could probably give the proper names for every shade.

My viewpoint turned and I was going along a path, up the wall. Nothing changed except that various stuff was going by. The tank looked the same. I turned around and saw someone where I had been, halfway up the wall and waving at me. He was standing out from the wall so he looked "down" from me even though I had to look "up" to see him. My head was beginning to hurt. I could feel the chair I was still sitting in, in the conference room, but all I saw was this huge tank and my stomach was thinking about getting rid of breakfast.

The Admiral said "That's enough, I don't want to get sick" and the tank went away; I was back in the conference room.

I got to the point. "What the fuck was that?"

The Admiral answered "That was the first ship they gave us. The Darjee, the people who brought it here, had bird-like ancestors and they prefer that kind of open space, or maybe, that kind of open sky. We, on the other hand, don't like land that curves like that, we don't care about the open space, and we REALLY don't like things that look like they are going to fall on our heads. We were spending all our time looking up instead of at what we were doing. We lost people because they weren't watching what they were doing."

"Every one of us complained of headaches, of nausea, and we demonstrated illness often enough to convince the AIs we had serious problem. They finally admitted that they had some older ships that had flat decks like the seagoing ships we build, and when we saw their plans we staged a strike until we got them. We love these ships, and we don't want to hear anything bad about them."

George said "We aren't built to live in that kind of ship. We need this kind, with flat floors."

The Admiral and I both said "decks" at the same time. Army guys. They aren't floors. They're decks.

"What's the difference?"

I didn't have a quick answer, but the Admiral did. "What's the difference between a Captain and a Major? A howitzer and a cannon? An APC and a tank? A cupola and a turret? You're on a ship. It's a deck."

George stood up, saluted the Admiral, and said "Aye, aye, Admiral" before sitting again.

All I could say was "You don't salute inside a building or ship unless you are covered. Don't they teach you Army guys anything?"

Back to business. "So, other than being a big trash can and making us sick or having decks and being normal, what differences do they have?"

"None at all. Both styles are the same on the outside, with rings holding pods. We're pretty sure that the different species in the Confederacy outfit the insides of the ship to suit their own needs. If we have it right, the first set we got were active ships being used by Darjee when they were sent here, and these we have now are unused ships outfitted for other species that the Darjee had in storage. If they don't want them, we certainly do." That was Randall, the intel guy.

"Mothballs. You don't just put a ship in storage like a pair of shoes. You go through a process to preserve them. It's called putting them in mothballs."

"It is so nice to have someone else who can teach these guys how to speak 'ship'. We spend half our time arguing terms." The Admiral.

I was almost immediately forced to back down from my "no remote-control shit in my brain" stand. It was all just too useful. I didn't have any emotional problems with any of the improvements -everyone wants to be the Six Million Dollar Man- I just wanted to retain control of it. That took some negotiating with the AIs, and some development work with all the headaches (literal in this case) that included, but we ended up with a set of improvements to the human body. Yes, we were all "fixed up" in that our bodies were all repaired back to perfect health, and then on top of that our bodies were modified as we wanted within reason, but we also got some improvements.

After the med-tubes were done with me I had what a human doctor would call "perfect hearing", yes, but I also had the option of turning on an augmented system that made my hearing much, much better. For instance, if I wanted I could listen to a motor's hum in any frequency range I chose and predict not only how long that motor would last but how it would fail when it went. Not that the aliens seemed to use the kinds of motors we used down on Earth but I'd find a use for the skill.

Vision was the same way, although that was driven by our fighter pilot (Frenchy) and our armored combat officer (George). I suspect that the Army really sent George up to keep an eye on Randall (What is that intelligence officer really doing up there?), but he had practical experience in an important field that the rest of us knew nothing about. Frenchy and George both wanted a tactical heads-up display that was built-in, no helmet or other hardware required that could fall off, get fogged up, or need batteries.

What they developed could give direction like a high-end GPS, highlight important objects (read that as "targets"), give ranges, vectors, and detailed information on those items like available weapons, keep track of current inventory (missiles, ammo, for all I know how many knives George was carrying), and so on. Since the hardware behind their HUD was programmable, upgrades happened instantly whenever they decided what they wanted.

And, yes, I got my goddamn red line back. I didn't mind too much. I'd made my point. Part of that system was two-way silent communications with the nearest AI; I could think myself asking a question (just not actually opening my mouth and making noise) and either hear the answer through the audio channel or see it, if that was more appropriate, on my own personal HUD. Once we got used to it, it was a lot more useful than a radio in my helmet that only helped when I was wearing my helmet.

That think-talking took some practice. The AIs insisted that they couldn't hear our thoughts. They could use the implant to drive impulses in our auditory and optic nerves that we interpreted as the AIs talking to us or whatever they wanted us to 'see', but that only worked for incoming audio and video. If we wanted to talk to them, we had to do something to generate nerve impulses they could collect and analyze. To do that, we had to pretend to talk. Some of us got it right away and some of us took longer. I expect that part of that was the AIs having to calibrate their implants at the same time the guy was trying different things. Sometimes they would hit on something that worked immediately, and sometimes it would take them awhile to get together.

Just to keep everyone honest, I insisted that any HUD info would pulse or flash, although each individual could adjust the rate on the fly if they wanted. That meant that, if I had a red line telling me where to go, it wasn't solid. The line blinked on and off every second and I could see normally without the red line in the way whenever it was cycled off. The political appointees didn't get that option. If their system showed their beloved wife as a giant hamster attacking them, the hamster wouldn't be blinking on and off as they killed the vorpal hamster in self-defense.

I could turn any of this stuff off by sending a subvocal message to the AI, returning me to my normal non-augmented senses. The clincher for me was that, even if there was no AI available -which the AIs seemed to believe was not likely- I could turn the new system off instantly, simply by mentally reciting Pi rounded to seven digits. If I did that, the system would completely shut down, leaving me to my own resources. Subvocally saying "3.141593" to myself was all it took to get my own eyes back.

And, if I didn't like what I saw with my own eyes, I could turn it all on again by subvocally reciting it to only 5 digits, "3.1416". Other people could choose other triggers, but I chose these as something that not only did I already have memorized and immediately available, but I was very unlikely to actually need, so having the system unexpectedly turn on or off at a bad time wasn't likely.

That was all mental stuff, though, and stuff that connected to things in our heads, like our eyes and ears. The Army guys were all going crazy with the other things the med-tubes could do. They wanted to become super-soldiers. They wanted to be stronger, faster, etc, etc, etc.

I would periodically ask what they were up to and they would offer to make me Superman, basically, able to stop a speeding bullet with my hand or leap tall buildings with a single bound. I didn't need all that. They were soldiers, and they were trying to be the best soldiers the alien technology could make them. I wasn't a soldier. I was a mechanic, a supervisor of mechanics, and an operating engineer. Generally all I needed was to be able to tell if this magic black box that we had accidentally plugged in backwards was going to blow up or not.

All questions about the different races in the Confederacy were gently deflected. The Darjee were the only ones the AIs would discuss, and then only in terms of environmental requirements. For instance, all of these ships had adjustable gravity. The obvious explanation was that this was to allow them to carry passengers or cargo which could not deal with the crew's normal needs. We could conclude from that that not everyone came from 1g planets.

In fact, the AIs pointed out that the ship's central habitat ball -the part between the two sets of rings, where the Darjee stayed and we were not allowed- had been set to a lower gravity than the rest of the ship along with other changes to make the Darjee crew more comfortable. It wasn't just our behavior that made them uncomfortable around us; even if we were universally known as wonderful people our atmosphere would automatically set them on edge, our light would stress their vision, and our gravity would tire them.

The AIs had assembled a standard set of "normal human needs" they could use whenever they handed a ship over to us. Gravity, air chemistry, pressure and temperature, trace contaminants that we liked, trace contaminants that we could not handle, Earth-normal "solar" lighting, living space background color and noise, a lot of things that aren't immediately obvious if you aren't a professional rocket scientist. The world's various space programs had done a lot of work on this.

So had the world's submarine programs, which was one of the reasons why Admiral Kennedy had asked for me. Every man in the US Navy Submarine Service had been on an airplane. Very few Air Force aircrew had ever been on a submarine. Very few aircrew had spent literally months sealed in their planes with no access to 'reality'. Submariners did it all the time. It was ludicrous to assume that Air Force personnel were ready to deal with the psychological effects of a months-long cruise, isolated in your tin can with no one to talk to except the smelly bastard in the next bunk.

Sure, each of the world's space programs turned out two or three men every year, ready to do this. The world's submarine programs took in thousands, maybe tens of thousands every year. With no offense intended to Frenchy and his people, they were all idiots if they thought that any of their Zoomie-U graduates knew more about living on a spaceship we did. I'd rather have an average Seaman or Fireman who had dropped out of high school, gotten a GED, joined the Navy, and spent a year on one of the boats.

However, I had never considered gravity to be a variable. That was an astronaut problem. And I had never considered a cylinder to be a viable floor plan either, unless I was reading one of Heinlein's stories about space-farms on huge wheels a hundred miles across that slowly rotated to make "gravity" to keep the cows and wheat happy. Apparently habitat geometry was also one of the things that differed among the different races, that the AIs dealt with to keep everyone in the Confederacy happy.

All in all, this was a pretty comfortable ship. On any human ship, you could be blindfolded, spun around a few times, carried around, and as soon as they let go of you you would pretty much know where you were. The different areas all had different noises, smells, vibrations, temperatures, humidity levels, and you didn't need the blindfold off to know where you were.

In fact, that was part of the test for a young sailor's dolphins, the pin that said they were "qualified" on that boat. For mine, they had covered an air-fed breathing mask with duct tape and had me put it on, had me put my ear plugs in and given me a set of "Mickey Mouse" hard plastic hearing protection earmuffs on top of that, and had the corpsman hook me up to an emergency air bottle so I could breathe while they led me all over the ship.

Not that there was any chance of losing me; if you could get lost on a submarine just because you were blind and deaf you weren't ready for the test. They had taken me down to the Engineroom Lower Level, to the seawater bay all the way aft, then lifted one side of the ear muffs and screamed in my ear "#3 torpedo tube is flooding! You've got to stop it before we all die!"

You mother fuckers! That's all the way forward! Did I forget to point out that the corpsman had unplugged his emergency breathing air tank and I couldn't breathe? It's all part of the game. If you have to take the air mask off to see or breathe, you fail.

Fine. Verify where you are. Plug into the air manifold right at the king-frame with the opening to the next bay forward. If there's too much smoke or something and you can't see it, the deck has a non-skid patch next to it so you can find it by feel. You're supposed to know where all the manifolds are, anyway. Breathe. Unplug and run to the air manifold in the lube oil bay. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. All the way forward, up the ladder, past the Reactor Compartment. YOU BASTARDS CLOSED THE HATCH!

A 688 only has a couple of watertight compartments, and the hatches are heavy enough for a battleship sailor to agree that they are armored. It doesn't swing, that would kill someone if the ship rolled. Plug in. Breathe. Crank the damn thing open. Go through it.

Get your head ripped off. God dammit. Unplug, then go through the hatch. Plug in. Breathe. Crank it shut on the assholes running the test, fuck them. I'm blind, they aren't, it's not my fault if they have their hands in the way and get crushed. Run forward. Run down the stairs. Plug in at the back of the torpedo room. Breathe. Run to the tubes. Figure out what the fuck they did. Close the inner door. Shut the drain valve. Shut the vent. Rip the mask off and scream at the bastards standing around watching the fun.

At my retirement ceremony, my dress uniform had both dolphins and the Navy's "Surface Warfare" pins on it. No one wearing dolphins will ever take the surface fleet's "Surface Warfare" pin or the aviators "Air Warfare" pin seriously. Those two pins mean that the wearer stood some training watches and took some tests. The dolphins mean that the wearer has proven that he is competent, qualified, able to, willing to and expected to take charge of any casualty anywhere on the ship, regardless of what it is or what his job is, if the experts aren't available.

Did I know how to launch a warshot and make it home in and kill an enemy? No, but I knew how to eject a hot-runner before it killed us. Just like the torpedomen had no business answering bells on the main engines but they knew how to activate the emergency seal on the propeller shaft at the far back of the ship. The engineroom's mechanics who maintained that seal had no idea how to receive a secret ELF message but they knew how to kill power to the radio room if it had an electrical fire. And the radiomen couldn't start or run the boat's emergency diesel generator, but they all knew how to shut it down safely. And so on.

As an officer wearing gold dolphins, I was supposed to know everything and be able to do anything, but that was a theoretic goal that was impossible to reach in the real world where we all had jobs to do. There was just too much to learn. That was why we had all those enlisted specialists. Each one was a master of their own specialty, and the silver dolphins that each one wore meant that they knew an awful lot about all the other specialties, too. Any man wearing dolphins would get a lot more respect from another one regardless of rank than any sailor without dolphins would. Oh, we could respect Frenchy's pilot's wings, he worked hard for those, but not any of that other garbage.

Anyway, this ship didn't have any of those clues to tell you where you were. It smelled the same everywhere, unless someone was eating. It didn't vibrate at the back, it didn't heave at the front. It didn't rock at all. It didn't have any odd half-noticed noises that your subconscious kept tabs on. Any submariner would be happy on this ship. It was far nicer than any of the boats. We just couldn't tell what part of the ship we were in from all the subconscious cues.

And, the US Navy had the largest and nicest submarines in the world. Okay, the Soviets had built some monsters that were even bigger than our Ohio-Class Boomers, but they weren't anywhere near as nice to live in. If I thought this was nice, sailors in the Pakistani Navy serving on worn-out broken-down Soviet hand-me-down pieces of shit would be ecstatic over this thing.

The same for sailors in the Turkish or Greek Navies serving on worn-out broken-down American hand-me-down pieces of shit. You could crew all the ships the aliens were giving us just by kidnapping every retired submariner in the world. I helpfully pointed that out, and added that somewhere in my office I had the latest newsletter from SubVets.

So, what-all did the AIs have to do to these ships to make them human-friendly? Some of it was obvious. Set the gravity to Earth-normal at sea level, then adjust the air to match: pressure, temperature, gas content. When I asked about that I got a listing of the various components. I pointed out that the Argon wasn't essential, but it didn't hurt either as long as it was all stable isotopes.

I used that as an excuse to point out that humans did not have a very high tolerance to radioactivity; if that wasn't a standard across their people they needed to list "low radioactivity level" as a human need. The AI told me that our genetic control system had more robust error detection and correction than some other races and thus our radiation tolerance was far higher than some other races in the Confederacy. Radiation would not be a problem for us as long as we stayed away from the propulsion system's main emitters.

Since my sleep-training told me that they only radiated at dangerous levels in a cone facing away from the ship's stern, that wasn't going to be a problem until we were climbing around outside the ship. Even then, it wouldn't be an immediate problem unless the ship was accelerating, using its main engines, and if that was true then no one should be climbing around outside anyway, right?

There were some other things done to make a ship "human-ready". To start with, the lights that we were playing with in that conference were complicated emitters that could be adjusted to provide normal light for an assortment of aliens. They wouldn't tell me how many specific setups they had, but I got them to show me normal lighting for the Darjee. That was a bit bright for me but I could handle it. Simple sunglasses would keep humans calm with that, but of course Earth-normal is better for us.

I got Doc Sorenson involved in this part of my education, as he knew more about what humans needed than I did. I just knew what we had figured out in the Submarine Service, or had figured out for us that applied to us.

One option for these ships was background color. All of the surfaces could change color. Some of them, like the walls (bulkheads!) could do it immediately upon demand; they had it as a built-in function, while others like the overheads and the decks could only do it slowly, as the ship's maintenance crew of robots modified the surfaces to match our needs. Uh, when I say 'robots' I mean those nanites, robots that were individually too small to see but were apparently individually programmable.

Unless a human made a specific request, all walls and ceilings were 'painted' a soft off-white. Actually, when I asked what this shade was called, I got a wall display of Wikipedia's "Shades of White" page and the AIs said that the shade in use was one defined by the human X11 computer standard as "snow".

That surprised me. First, that there was a color named "snow", and second that the color named "snow" wasn't "bright fucking white". I mean, I've seen fresh snow, both in the air and on the ground. Until someone messes with it, snow is pretty much the whitest white that white can be. Some things just have to be seen to be believed. How can a color called "snow" not be white? No wonder the AIs thought we were all dangerously unstable.

Our furniture was all human-specific, of course. The AIs had learned several patterns for human furniture, and could provide any of them as needed. That took time, unless we wanted to bother the Darjee. If it was urgent, they had a super-sized replicator in the engineering spaces that could make things very quickly.

If it wasn't urgent, though, we gave the order and left the room alone for several hours while the ship's nanites built whatever it was we wanted. Don't ask how it happened, though. If you haven't taken that replicator maintenance course they gave me, you won't understand it. If you have taken that course, you already know how it's done. The room is isolated and becomes, functionally, a room-sized replicator that builds what you need. It's recommended that living tissue not be inside the replicator while it works. Trust me, they are serious about that one.

Along with the furniture, all the med-tubes and sleep-trainers (which were merely minimal med-tubes) were sized and shaped for humans. If the ship was to be used by a different member species, they would all modify themselves to fit that species, or if they couldn't do it themselves the ship's maintenance systems would do it for them.

About the last thing that had to be set up specifically for humans was the allowable food menu from the galley replicators. Since they were all AI-controlled, that was easy. They just refused to offer, or take orders for, any food item outside a list of human-compatible food items. This approved food list was the only human-compatibility need that was still being worked on when I got there.

All of the others (gravity, air, light, etc) were all deemed immediately critical and had been developed with, by, and for the very first couple of humans ever sent up here. That had been a squad of UN security staff who had been sent to Freighter #1 as guinea pigs the day after first contact. The functionary in charge may have been European, but the guards were all NYPD cops who had moved up to a cushy job that paid better and almost never had to argue with a NYC cabbie.

I'd bet good money that after a couple hours of arguing with disembodied computer voices about what humans needed to live, those cops were all ready to go back to their beats and deal with the cabbies again.