The fact of the matter was this, however; while Mike McBrayer could fix anything from a model car to a jet engine with his bare hands, banging his knuckles and caking grease under his nails, computers were an alien species to him. Say words like byte, binary or code and Mike's eyes would begin to glaze over; he would automatically class you as a 'nerd' and probably begin calculating how much trouble he might get in for trying to give you a wedgie. So the fact that one of the circuits Mike had tripped was a very important one linked to the cruise ship's onboard computer, the central nervous system that ran most of the internal machinery of the ship, was overlooked in Mike's haste to sabotage the ship's course. The re-routing caused too much power to go through one breaker, whereas before it had been divided among several, and the breaker box wasn't designed to conduct quite that much power in one go. The whole thing had begun to heat up, then glow red, then spark--- by the time the full-scale electrical fire was blazing, it was too late to do anything but try to evacuate, and once the flammable shit went up... the ship was a birthday cake blazing on the ocean's surface.
Mike hadn't been able to get to the life boats in time; he was on a lower deck in his tiny, shitty cabin, trying to shove as much stuff as he could into a bag. He didn't have much money, and he hadn't been able to bring anything except the weed he'd bought ashore so there weren't even any valuable drugs on him. Christ, he was going to need his weed if they ended up stranded or shipwrecked. He shoved his glass pipe into the bag, his cigarettes, his baggie of weed, his lighter--- everything he could. Just a few things he couldn't leave behind, a couple of faded t-shirts, a pair of jeans. He was in his Dickies and work shirt, his heavy engineer boots; they would protect his feet if he had to walk anywhere, but would weigh him down if he had to swim.
When Mike was running down the hallway, however, he could actually see the flames coming around the corridor, and there was another loud BOOM! as something blew. Some old fuck's oxygen tank, maybe, or a stash of liquor in one of the rooms. Either way, the fireball resulted in even more chaos down below, broke-ass cruisegoers and low-level crew members racing for the stairwells, some idiots mashing the elevator button despite clear labeled warnings not to use the elevator in times of emergency or fire and this was both. Mike really fucking hated people sometimes. He was running as fast as he could for the stairs, shoving people out of his way; a man was pulling a girl, presumably his fiancee, along, and Mike shouldered them aside as hard as he could to get to the stairs first. The man let out an angry shout but Mike was in full-blown panic mode like a forest animal trying to escape the fire. He saw a dark-haired woman in a crew shirt up above, trying frantically to navigate people, shouting directions; he thought maybe it was Ophelia, that hot bitch from guest services who was fucking that limp-dicked old bartender who always cut him off at crew parties. He didn't look long enough to be sure, though.
When he exploded out of the ship's interior and out onto the open deck, Mike thought that fresh air had never tasted so sweet. He gulped it in great sucking gasps, grabbing the railing to support himself for a moment as he looked around. People were herding onto the life boats, despite the crew shouting for people to calm down. He assumed that he'd wasted too much time in his cabin as they were evacuating, as there were already a lot less people on the deck than it looked like there should be. The ship was sinking, water already lapping over parts of the ship that were way higher than the usual waterline mark, and he looked around.