REZQ do not invest heavily in training their employees. In fact, they do not invest in it at all. If a tool or onboard system has an instruction booklet, fine. If it’s in a language that their employee can read, even better. Beyond that, your average REZQ employee is left alone to figure out how to use the wide array of dangerous and unusual devices at their disposal (and, of course, which employees have to pay to hire).
PHOME Throwers. Hull saws. Stasis lances. Portable energy cells powered by volatile unprocessed Salient-compliant FTL fuel. Any one of these things could save a life, end one, or–horrifyingly likely–effect an unintended and unknowable outcome between those two results. Those kind of images drive nightmares that even a Somno implant cannot suppress.
You could consult your ship’s onboard AI — but their layered, psychotic palimpsest personalities, built out of systems emulating systems emulating systems, are not usually capable of understanding even basic queries. If you’re near enough a voidnet provider hub that you have bandwidth credit for, you can try and find tutorial videos–though this is expensive, reliant on coincidence, and not advisable under pressure. You could, perhaps, ask the client being rescued, but it depends whether or not they happen to have the power of speech at the time.
In Thom’s case, lacking any meaningful education before his time at REZQ, trial and error is usually the only plan. A few months’ patchy and irrelevant experience is usually the only thing to squeeze his scrawny shoulder and give him a vague clue what to do next. But some trials can end in errors that cannot be reversed or mitigated. Every trigger pulled, every button pushed, every port blindly filled with cables-that-look-sort-of-correct… each one adds to the accumulation of odds in a cosmically vast gamble with every life in the room, including, of course, his own.
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