Free now to move without monitoring, John Hunt stood, unlocked the door to the cabin and left, his machine mind still reporting that he was sleeping quietly in his cabin.

* * *

“Hi, Mark, how you doing? As you were.” John Hunt said to the petty officer at the door of the engine room.

John’s proactive role in the engineering department saw him coming and going from the hot room many times a day, so the petty officer hadn’t even really made to stand up as his superior approached.

“Hey, Lieutenant.” said the semi-awake Liverpudlian who, like his colleagues, loved that John was one of those officers who didn’t stand on ceremony.

John walked through the bulkhead into the twenty-foot deep engine room and slid down the ladder from the gantry to the main floor below. Landing with a clang on the metal engine room floor, he walked toward the two vast, green painted diesel engines, nodding to the two or three men dotted around them.

Walking down between the engines, and out of sight of the others, he extracted a small black disc the size of a quarter from his pocket. At the far end of the engine room, the roaring engines focused into two great driveshafts that drove through and out the back of the lowest point of the hull, driving the two thirty-foot propellers churning under the back of the ship.

John glanced briefly over his shoulder and seeing no one looking, placed the disc on the rim of the giant bearing that sealed the hull around the spinning driveshaft. A red glow appeared on the surface of the disk, resolving into a set of numbers. Running his finger gently around the outside of the disk, John set the numbers to the precise time he desired and then turned and walked away.

As he walked away, the disc’s surface went blank once more, its surface began to morph into the color of its surroundings, changing to match the deep, glossy, frequently repainted green of the ship’s two engines.

* * *

The next morning, John lay in his bunk until the moment that his machine mind had reached the end of the recording he had placed into it. As it started relaying real-time once more, he stood up and left his room, his two ‘friends’ snoring in other bunks, heading to the engine room for his scheduled shift.

As he approached the door to the engine room, Able Seaman Julian (Mark had long since gone to bed himself) stood and saluted him.

“Morning, Julian. As you were.” John said smiling. Some of the sailors were more willing to relax than others. Nothing that John could say or do would make young Julian stop standing to attention when John walked into the room.

“Morning, sir.” said the petty officer, saluting.