Inktober 2026 - 17 - Contraption

He had to say, despite the evident hardships they had encountered since crash-landing on this planet, it felt nice to get back to the basics of mechanical engineering, or, as he liked to call it in his mind: common sense-driven building.

Back on Earth, so many people had become entirely reliant on electronics, and even worse, so called artificial intelligence (which was not actually intelligent in terms of logical thinking but rather in the fact that it had access to a lot of information, and that was about it), that very few would have survived on here for more than a day. Sadly, even with the elite crew they thought they had formed, they had still lost a couple of team members from other causes than injuries sustained during the crash itself.
Entry into the atmosphere had fried pretty much all of their advanced sensors, and for some reason one of them hadn’t been able to compensate for their absence with his own senses.
One had made a dreadful miscalculation and refused to acknowledge her colleagues attempting to correct her, which had lead to her needless death.
Finally, one had actually committed suicide out of desperation to be without his usual tools, specifically his computerised companion.

Those that remained were aware that progress would be considerably slower than anticipated without the aid of their usually faithful devices, but they had made do without them nonetheless. They were all supposed to be highly qualified engineers, and they were proving it every day. Within a week they had a more than adequate shelter, both in terms of safety and comfort, and within a few more they had traps for food and the groundwork for agriculture. All without electricity.

What had made their spaceship crash had been a flare from a nearby star – presumably the nearest one –, which pretty much caused a major electromagnetic pulse. They had soon realised this was a regular occurrence in these parts, which explained why they had to think outside the box and forgo their reliance on electrical power. They did not throw away what little functioning electronics they had, but they shielded them in a small room and used them sparingly. Since scaling up such protective measures would not be possible even without being short on manpower and resources, they had set that idea aside and focused on alternative solutions.

Walking around the camp today, and looking at the various pulleys, wheels, gears, chimneys, and other mechanisms moving, turning, and pumping in some sort of harmony filled them all with a strong sense of pride. It was all fully functioning. They did need to work on the noise it all made, but that had not been identified as an emergency. In some ways, they even found it comforting, in this unfamiliar landscape. There was always the possibility that it warded off predators, although they were working on something else for that, too. By now, the trickiest part was figuring out what challenge to set their sights on next.