I'd like to tell you all about a man called Einstein and why geniuses and spaceships don't mix. But before I tell you all about that I should tell you that I'm not going to tell you about my first flight. That's a lot of telling isn't it? So before I find myself abandoned on a desert island lets do Einstein.

There are some people who look like their names, like my mum, but I think you know enough about her for now. Einstein looked the part: bushy hair, beard that could have doubled as a nature reserve and a sense of style straight from the homeless shelter. In short, this man was either an eccentric technician, a mad scientist or genuinely homeless. He could of course have been a combination of all three. So how did Mr Homeless Probably Mad Scientist Einstein happen into our quiet backwater lives? Did I pick up my communicator and dial for a genius? Did the Acme Corp drop him off in a crate? Nah, sorry, wrong, none of the above or you can take me away in chains. Uh… on second thoughts, let's not do chains again. I've got painful memories about that whole episode. So, to cut to the point, Einstein sort of happened to us.

So there we were, maiden flight concluded, basking in the warm afterglow of the engines whilst standing on the boarding deck in the station. We all smirked at each other in a combination of pride and relief that we hadn't messed up and got ourselves killed. I had made a mental note to change out of my brown trousers into something a little more comfortable so we could hit the bar, when Einstein arrived. He looked our ship over, appeared to take some measurements and then, without a word, boarded the ship. This was my ship (okay, our ship if you include Ken and Podia), and no-one just walks onto my ship without permission from the captain…me then. Then I realised something quite important had happened to me. I was a proper captain at last; I'd finally flown my spaceship somewhere. Yeehaaah, the beers are on me. I can't invite all of you round to the party just yet; this space station isn't big enough for that.

But enough frippery. Some random homeless guy (with a beard) had boarded my ship (and he had a beard). Did I say I didn't like guys with beards? I'm even less keen on women with beards but I think that's easier to explain. So I did what any sane ship's captain would do; I picked up a wrench from Kzen's tool kit and headed on board to (politely) ask this guy to leave my ship. When I got on board I realised that it's hard to be polite whilst you're carrying a wrench but I might as well keep it with me just in case. Anyway I found Mr Beard standing on the bridge looking at the controls of my flight deck.
"Can I help you?" I said, with sufficient overtones of 'And I'm carrying a monkey wrench…' to make myself clear on the matter.
"Nope, I'm good."
Damn.
I wasn't expecting that for an answer. I paused for a beat and then decided to come on a little stronger.
"No, I don't think you understand me, this is my ship and I'd like you to"
"S'kay I'm just checking this rig out, come back later if you want", he interrupted. Bearded bastard.
I clearly hadn't come on stronger at all. I sighed a little internal sigh, straightened myself out and said a lot more firmly:
"I don't think you get this, bud. This is my ship and you're not meant to be here."
"Yeah, I get that, but y'ought to know I know a few things, top secret stuff, 'sepecially the mark threes."
He wasn't going to take no for an answer. Now before anyone reads the last paragraph back to me, just because I didn't say no doesn't mean that I didn't imply NO with a big fluffy capital N, hold the fluffy. So what next? He was busy prodding various inputs on my command console and talking to himself, which was good, since that provided him with sufficient distraction for me to hit him over the head with the monkey wrench. He fell faster than a sack of spanners down a gravity well. Then I came to my senses, or should I say that I was forcibly brought to my senses.
"Shzpak, Sun, you've killed him," said Kzen.

I'm not sure when Kzen decided to take an interest in my relationships with bearded men, but I really wish he hadn't seen me hit him over the head with the wrench. I didn't feel guilty about hitting him: this was my ship and he appeared to be a fully paid up member of the tinfoil hat brigade (and seeing as he had a beard probably the chief druid of something like that). I just didn't want anyone to witness me clocking this guy from behind, as it wasn't terribly sporting. Don't ask about the sporting bit, it's a Nu-Kunni thing. So there you go; I had my reasons and Kzen had his, which led to the inevitable professional disagreement:
"Sun, if you've killed him…"
I interrupted him before he could say any more, "Of course I haven't killed him - he's still breathing." "Sun, I don't think he is breathing…"
Ah, I thought, game, set and…" Shzpak"?
For a few appalling seconds we both watched, convinced that Mr Beard had stopped breathing, then he had a coughing fit.
"Okay genius, how many people who can't breathe have a coughing fit?" I said smugly. (Game, set and Shzpak to me!)
I don't think Kzen was feeling great about me hitting Mr Beard but he wasn't exactly happy with some random guy boarding the ship either. I could see one feeling collide with the other right in the middle of his face, which led to an odd mixed expression.
"Next time, perhaps a little less hard huh?" He offered.
That was a peace offer if I ever saw one, "Okay Kzen, maybe I went in a little too hard. What do you want to do with him?"
Now, I'll give Kzen this: he's a tough guy in a fight, but he'll never kick a guy when he's down.
"Frak it" He sighed, "Let's take him back to the pod and we'll make sure he's okay".
So we three took him back to the pod to see if there was any permanent damage. We broke out the emergency bottle of Spoog's Pod Juice which Podie kept in reserve. Now there are a few things you need to know about Spoog's Pod Juice: you never drink it neat, never let it near naked flames and you never inflict a shot of this stuff on strangers unless you have a signed release form. A few capfuls of the clear liquid wafted under his nose and poured down this throat prompted much coughing, rolling of eyes and the eventual sitting upright on the bed screaming moment. Don't worry it's quite normal for Spoog's pod juice to have that effect on you: that's why it has a skull and cross bones on the label. He made an astonishing trip back to the land of the conscious, albeit with revolving eyeballs. He felt the back of his head and winced when he felt an egg sized lump on the back of his skull.
"Why do people do that?" He muttered to himself, and then he looked up at us and carried on as if nothing had happened.
"So you've got yourselves a mark three huh?"
I looked at Kzen and Podie and they looked back at me. I think we all had a look of "this does not compute" on our faces. Kzen spoke before I did, "Yeah."
"Cool, the mark three is a great little ship, so many mods you can retrofit, lots of cool tricks. Have you tried any modding yet?" He said.
I'd like to give you some advice. If a bearded maniac starts talking about modifying your ship, the best thing you can do is to hit him over the head with the biggest blunt object you can find and then RUN LIKE HELL. We made the critical mistake of continuing to talk to him.
"Mods?" I said incautiously. I should have known that this was the word that our man was looking for. Once I'd said it the floodgates were opened.
"Oh yeah, let me tell you all about the cool mods you can do."
Several hours passed. Suffice to say he told us all about the cool and indeed groovy (his words not mine) things that you could do to a mark three ship. Some of them got Kzen, Podie quite excited and their eyes lit up in anticipation of what could be done. One thing led to another and, throwing caution to the winds, we departed to the bar and fed our man (who we nicknamed Einstein) sufficient drink to loosen his tongue some more so that could negotiate a few little things with him.
By the end of the evening we knew the following: the mark three Impairor was a significant departure for the Amarr Imperial Shipyards. It was the first ship to have dual controls to cater for pod and standard pilots. As such non-pod pilots could fit additional equipment to the pod interface ports which sat dormant under the control deck floor. To access and control the pod interfaces, you had to modify the main flight deck panels, to translate the flow of information and commands between the old flight deck and newer pod pilot's feeds. This cheap way to control this flow was by fitting a heavily modified ballistic collision artifice unit, modified with a control surface adaptor. Say what, I can hear you ask? Okay to give you an idea of how this holds together: the pod pilot's neural interfaces process highly exotic information which a standard instrument rack can't easily digest. To prevent accidental seizure of the controls, because they're overwhelmed with the wrong kind of information, you need something that can sum and filter the flow from pod feed to standard control rack. The cheapest way to do this, according to our Einstein, was to use an adapted ballistic collision artifice unit, which was designed to take insanely complex inputs and spit out very simple answers. To achieve this you had to re-flash the internal processor with a different command set and voila: an instant down state gearing unit, whatever that is. So all this talk of interfacing with a pod pilot's secret mojo kit sounds good, but what could you actually do with it? Ah, welcome to the dark side with a short detour via democracy.

Concord and the local Ni-Kunni border police have their own private, encrypted channels. They use these channels to communicate all sorts of useful information that an average pilot might want to get their grubby paws on. The problem with Concord (and the police) is that they were paranoid about people listening into their chit chat, so they swathed their communications in military grade encryption. Einstein wasn't put off by inconveniences like encryption or legality and he'd cooked up a solution: use the aforementioned ballistic collision artifice unit, a control surface adaptor, synchronise that to two non-euclydian gyrometric crypto spoolers (no I have no idea what they are even now) and a pseudo-random prime boot scrambler (yeah, whatever, it does stuff I'm sure). The combination of these units, the pod interfaces and a random seed key from a Concord interface, was enough apparently to crack the Concord airwaves. Podie and Kzen couldn't get enough of the mumbo jargo (or is that jumbo - I had could feel my brain hurting from all the jargon) that Einstein was spouting. I was more sceptical but unfortunately outvoted by my trusty crew.
"What could go wrong?" They both insisted looking like puppies at dinner time,
"The worst that could happen is this thing doesn't work and we don't get to listen to Concord" Said Kzen. "So if it doesn't work we get to rip it out and we're down, what? About a thousand and change? I think it's worth the risk".
A thousand and change was, admittedly, a small price to pay for a huge leap forward in intelligence gathering potential. I shook hands with Einstein and agreed to start the modifications the next morning.
So, bright and early Kzen, Podie and I all trooped over to the ship, only to find Einstein had beat us to it. The flight deck was already in pieces and all we could see were his legs, as he bent round underneath the deck flooring to tinker with something. I could hear vague mutterings which must have been him talking to himself. I coughed loudly to make sure that he knew we were there. After about, oh I don't know, five minutes or so, he surfaced with a huge grin on his face and a big bundle of wires and chips in his hand.
"Look at that, an original R328 combination phase stabiliser. Gods know how it lasted this long!"
To me it looked like he was holding up a bunch of dirt encrusted wires. Look - I'm the kind of guy that takes out the broken bit, looks up the serial number, orders another bit just like the first bit and puts it all back together. Einstein worked at a different level. I bet he even had pet names for some of his favourite bits of tech. Kzen and Podie were grinning at him: which was a worrying level of encouragement to give a man like Einstein. In the end I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and I left the ship to go run a few errands. I was hoping that Kzen and Podie would eventually get bored of wires and interfaces and decide to come find me. No such luck: they were at it for the entire day and finished late enough in the evening that I'd given up hope and gone to the bar. Einstein would become a problem if he deprived me of bar time with my buddies.
The next morning both of them were yapping away about their discoveries about the ship, the fun (fun? you call wiring fun?) they'd had reconfiguring the comms system and how much they'd learned from Einstein.
"Sorry to be in a hurry here guys but were there any problems?"
"We had a few teething troubles, nothing too big though." Said Podie.
"What about you Kzen, do you think there's anything to worry about?"
"Nah, it's going to be fine once we've shaken out a few things here and there."
Well they both sounded confident and after a light grilling, and a dusting of heavy scepticism from me, they were still confident that everything was going to be just fine. I couldn't see that disagreeing with them was going to get me too far, so I decided to go along with them and see where life took us.
Life took us all a heck of a lot further than we were expecting it to.