Okay, I don't mind the first sentence, I loved the second sentence, but the third one made me laugh. I don't know if that was your goal. But it seems a little melodramatic to me. And it felt out of place with the first two so my reaction was to giggle.
The second sentence is definitely my favorite here. I love how quickly it drops us right into the scene and gives us a sense of the world and the people occupying it.
Haha, well two outta three ain't bad! Yeah, I really only had that to firmly establish Melanie as the MC. I could delete it and go right to sentence #4:
Lab-grown and cubical it might be, but even under emergency lights the thing looked enough like the human version to turn stomachs when Linus wrenched it from its receptacle.
But then that's two characters without setting a POV. I'll play with it some more. Thanks!
The scenario alone would make me read on, although I think you can tweak it to make it even grabbier. Right now "crowded the hot control room" reads as if the action is simultaneous with "hunched over the charred hub." The charred Calculator is the most interesting thing in the scene, so I'd give it center stage. (You could add the location a sentence later, maybe even add it to the dialogue tag; i.e. "...she thought, shivering in spite of the sweltering control room," or something like that.)
A little nitpick: I think you need to either break the first line into two sentences, or use an em-dash or semicolon instead of the comma. Again, this isn't so much fixing a punctuation error as it is to punch up the tension.
Thanks! I originally had it as a semicolon, but I figured that might seem pretentious in the first sentence. I often overuse dashes, but maybe it works here. I suppose I could put "the hot control room" in the fourth sentence without otherwise harming things...
I'm kind of a sci-fi realist, so I always have trouble suspending disbelief when a ship has something along the lines of a "jump calculator." The sheer volume of calculations needed to do what I assume to be a hyper-speed faster-than-light jump are beyond the capabilities of all our current computers combined. There are just so many variables to consider in such an endeavor that the computing force required necessarily means any future ships doing FTL jumps would almost have to rely on a massive network of computers to do the calculations.
Yep, that's why you need a biological brain- the most complicated computer in existence- to do it!
And suppose growing and "harvesting" these computers was so commonplace that in a disaster even the future equivalent of a mechanic could replace one? Pretty creepy I think. Too bad no place wants to buy the damn story!!!