Theseus

Reality hit me like a speeding truck. Every muscle in my body contracted, ready to spring out and do whatever was necessary to break loose. I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could in hopes that someone outside could hear me. I flailed about with a desperate need to escape my confinement, unexpectedly slamming my arms against something before I grabbed it and leveraged myself against it, trying to skirt away from my prison any way that this newfound foothold would allow me.

“Meryll!” A familiar voice cracked, causing me to freeze and examine my predicament. Gravity. I felt gravity. And the air made me shiver. My hands were placed down against the ground. Solid ground. One was pressed against the familiar cold steel floor of my heart, and the other had a soft, thin fabric between me and the same floor. And best of all, I could feel myself move at the pace I expected to. Time moved as normal.

Real. This was real. I had to tell it to myself several more times before it registered. I wasn’t trapped in the back of my head anymore. I recalled watching Doc approach my body in agonizingly slow motion that felt like the passage of days rather than seconds, to disengage me from the psychic damper’s influence. I was free. My head ached with the echo of pain caused by rushing brain chemistry in the aftermath of the emergency ejection from computational time, but I was free.

I panted loudly, trying to catch my breath as I started consciously registering the data stream, my interfaces left exactly where my soulless logical counterpart had left them before Doc saved me. I did my best to ignore the gaping hole in my closed-eye vision and stopped to watch the system clock tick by. Five hours had passed while I was knocked out. I watched the milliseconds once more zooming by too quickly for me to register, counting the steady rise of seconds passing as seconds should. It was beautiful.

“Meryll,” came the voice again, gentler this time, but still full of concern. Doc. It was Doc. I slowly peeked out from beneath one eyelid, afraid that it would somehow stop being real if I tried to look.

I was sitting on the floor of Theseus’s heart. Doc stood over me, staring down at me with the concern a parent might have for a child who’d just had an unexpected fall that they weren’t immediately bouncing back from. He held both hands out in front of him, palms down. “Breathe.” he commanded, pushing both hands down against the air in front of him as if that was supposed to calm me somehow. It worked.

I continued panting in a focused rhythm now, my eyes darting about the room, trying to make sense of being in control of myself and being able to observe reality again. I looked down to see that I’d been put on the floor, a makeshift bed of a few stray blankets and towels thrown together beneath me. My needless flailing had haphazardly thrown a few of them into a twisted mess around me.

Up on the examination table I typically used as a bed was Joel, sitting up and silently observing me from across the room with no pants on and a thick bandage wrapped around his wounded leg. I’d been placed down here because Doc was still dealing with the medical aftermath of our last battle.

“Meryll. Look at me.” Doc drew my attention back to him and he held up four fingers.

I beat him to the question. “F-F-Four,” I fluttered hoarsely, an unexpected shaking in my voice. “F-Four fingers.” I nodded at him and he lowered his hand. I was still catching my breath, glancing about the room for unseen danger as I slowly pulled my legs up, hugging them tight to my chest. Doc moved around me and pulled one blanket up to rest over my shoulders.

“Is she-?” Joel started, but Doc held a hand out to stop him, and to Joel’s credit, he didn’t push it.

“Talk to me, Meryll.” Doc said slowly, reaching behind him and producing a bottle of water that must have been left next to me in my repose. I gingerly grabbed hold of it with one hand and took a long, glugging swig. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until it slid down my throat. The world came back into focus, and I let out a satisfied sigh once I’d had my fill, the flask half empty.

“N-Needed that.” I commented, still shaking “Thanks Doc.”

Doc nodded, taking a step back to give me some room. “You wanna tell me what happened in there? That wasn’t like you. I know you hate using that thing, and this was hardly a good time to experiment.”

I suddenly lifted my other arm, patting the back of my head, relieved that my expansion bay was vacant. Just an empty space where the cylindrical damper usually sat. Ordinarily, I hated having missing hardware; it made me feel incomplete. It still did, but that time was an exception. I didn’t want that thing in my system right then. I nodded with approval before I readjusted the blanket again and took in a deep breath to start talking. “I-I… I was attacked…” I swallowed, my words refusing to steady.

Both Doc and Joel looked surprised to hear that. “You were attacked.” Joel didn’t sound convinced. “Locked inside a machine surrounded by people in a room with one door?”

“Not ph-physically.” I barely had the capacity to speak clearly, I definitely didn’t have the capacity to glare condescendingly at Joel at the moment. But I tried my best. “Malware.”

Doc’s concern grew to an alert seriousness “You were hacked? By who? Skygraves? Foundation?”

I nodded when he got to Foundation. Communication felt hard right now, and I was already exhausted knowing all the nuance I would have to talk through to explain what I’d just experienced properly, but right now, I was just so happy to be back in my own skin. “Ninety-t-two s-seconds,” I whimpered, sniffling as I felt my eyes beginning to tear up. I felt at the small scrapes and bruises I’d given my arms in the throes of waking up thinking I was still trapped. Even being able to feel hurt was comforting.

“A minute and a half…” Doc nodded slowly. He understood. I’d told him about my experiences with the damper before. From my experiments, I’d estimated about a nine hundred times slower perception of time, but it was hard to say that figure held up now. I would have felt like I’d been under for almost a full 24 hour day in ninety-two seconds, which would have been hell already if it was only that. But it had felt like much longer. Maybe it was just the sheer anxiety and existential dread of being locked out of control of my own body and mind for so long warping my perception, but it felt like I’d endured it for a week.

Joel grumbled something unkind, but I think he at least got that he couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through, so he just lied back down rather than make an ass out of himself like the last time I’d been emotionally despondent.

Silence filled the room as I continued to take in the world around me, taking deep, calming breaths while I tried not to cry. I don’t think I’d ever taken the time to appreciate just how nice it was to be able to look where I wanted to look. Just having that simple proof of control over my body and mind had renewed value to me. For a few moments, I just existed and observed little fragments of my own agency to remind myself that I was me again.

I let out one more deep breath and then broke the silence “Cassandra.” I stated with a strained tone. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t summon her into the video feed again by mentioning her by name. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

“Who’s Cassandra?” Doc murmured.

“Art-Arthausen unit.” I reminded him. He went through a few expressions. Surprise, confusion, back to serious concern, pity directed at me, all jumbled together and cycling as he pondered the implication.

“From Dr. Fuller’s report… That Cassandra?” He asked. I nodded. “She hacked you? Wait, the Arthausen units are alive?”

I nodded quickly, clutching at the corners of the blanket on my back and holding it tight to my chest. “She attack-tacked me. Said… Said a lot… a lot of things. Turned on the damper.” I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering if it might just be easier to write up a report instead of trying to explain everything out loud. The words coming out of my mouth wouldn’t cooperate with how I pictured them in my head.

“Well, we’re out of relay range of Venus. No one can touch you out here. Just rest. Everyone on this ship needs to rest.” Doc nodded down to me, speaking confidently. “You’re safe now, Meryll.”

“S-Safe?” My voice stuttered incredulously at a notion so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but show a pained smile at the absurdity of hearing it. I didn’t feel safe. I felt very much the opposite of safe. I was being pursued across the stars by a violent psychopath from a past I barely understood, who had drilled a backdoor into my brain and left me a broken mess right after I’d just shaken the last person who wanted to rip me apart for the secrets in my mind. I was an outlaw by merit of my existence. I’d been chased to the near edge of the system, and was forced to flee right back into the den of my pursuers. What about anything in my life was safe?!

I thought I was about to bawl, to break down into tears, but I was surprised to hear something between a sob and a low huffing chuckle escape my lips. Wait. That didn’t feel right. But I’d cried so much already. I’d spent so much time recently cowering and lashing out and crying. My emotions felt burned out. I suppose some part of my body told me, even as tears rolled down my face that the absurdity of my life was almost comedic, and my body latched onto that. I couldn’t stop myself from letting out quiet breathy laughter, desperately telling my body to stop. It wouldn’t listen, and that somehow made it start building more. Maybe this was why Cassandra said I was always running from myself, returning to some kind of morbidly mundane simulation of a real life. A life that was less full of all of this pain and nonsense. In that moment, I started to see the appeal. I took in a deep gasping breath, ready to surrender to the release of my meaningfully absurd emotional response and succumb to manic laughter-

But I froze again when I felt a hand pressed against my head. My expression fell neutral when I was forced to process the physical grounding the hand gave me. My still-gentle laughter disappeared into nothing as I opened my eyes again and looked up to see Doc crouching down to my level. He’d patted a hand gently onto the top of my head, brow creased with concern as he repeated the word. “Safe.”

I nodded lethargically. “Safe.” I repeated, the word finally bringing me back down from the verge of some kind of psychological break I wasn’t immediately equipped to process. Of course I was safe. I had Theseus. I had the crew. Doc, Joel, Aisling, Ray, Mouse, even Shaw to some extent, they’d had put themselves on the line for me. I wasn’t alone in any of this. They’d proven they would go through hell to keep me safe, and I knew I would eagerly do the same for them. Us people on the fringe of society, forced by everyone to abandon the comfort of civilization, could only find solace with other survivors. The other people who understood this pain. Aisling was right and Cassandra was wrong. I belonged here.

I sat back, feeling my muscles relax as I huddled into my protective blanket armor. Doc slowly pulled his hand up and gave me a slow nod before he returned to his feet. He turned his attention to his patient, leaving me to process, but he kept glancing my way to ensure I wasn’t about to fall apart again. I had managed a firm grasp of myself again, though.

The sudden drop in emotional pressure had left me introspective. I had never felt that vulnerable before. Godin didn’t even make me feel as weak as I did a few moments ago. Ever since I’d embraced being a starship, being locked away in that core module was armor against almost everything that could do me actual harm. Only the presence of a hostile ship, offering the nebulous threat of psychosomatic harm, or being taken out of the core module, exposing my soft fleshy self to the perils of the world, could pose any actual danger. Cassandra had tainted that. I wasn’t invincible anymore in that space.

It would still be the only place I’d be able to find a true mental reprieve from the stress of the data stream, I would still find comfort in the void, but that sense of security had been shattered. There was no such thing as absolute safety, not anymore. And there was proof of that at hand every time I closed my eyes.

But despite all of that, I could still feel secure enough to keep going, so long as I had them by my side. I was safe.

—

My emotional meltdown had been successfully quelled, so Doc left me on my side of the room to tend to his patients. He occasionally asked if I needed anything to eat or drink, but I’m not sure if I could have kept anything down. He also didn’t press me for any further details. I think he knew this was important enough that I was going to have to repeat myself once we could gather our battered crew into one place, anyway. And I was already having a difficult enough time trying to express it once.

It took me a few hours to stop shaking. It wasn’t the cold; I was used to that. And the fear passed as my emotional state mended itself. I wondered if I’d been right during Cassandra’s attack, though, and she’d done something terrible and lasting to me. My mind-body connection had been pushed far past its limit right after some kind of neurological attack. The sudden onset of my newfound speech impediment was startling evidence of the effect it had had on me.

Talking got easier, but I still found myself stumbling over my words, and sometimes I lost track of what I was saying mid-sentence and had to pause to find my words again. It was like my mind couldn’t keep up. It made Doc frown whenever I stuttered or trailed off.

After Joel left the room on a crutch, Doc had me take the examination table next, despite the fact that he apparently hadn’t seen to Mouse yet. He spent a long time glaring at my vitals, looking very unsatisfied at whatever he saw. “You’ll live,” he grumbled when I asked, and then wordlessly moved on to replacing the destroyed motherboard in my hip. Something was definitely wrong, he just didn’t think I was strong enough to hear it in the moment.

I swallowed as I sat up, the new board integrating smoothly into the data stream, and noticed, sitting on a towel on the countertop, was my psychic damper module. That damn thing. Part of me didn’t even want to see it again, and I was even more mortified to think about it being a part of my system again. It had stung me in the past, and I’d reluctantly picked it back up again to fill the empty space it had left me with, but this time was different. This wasn’t a sting, this was a mauling. This was the nightmare I’d always feared of the device coming true, and I knew it could have been so much worse if not for Doc’s timely intervention.

Doc saw me staring, the threat of a cold sweat beginning to form on my skin, and interrupted my thoughts “You don’t have to put it back in, yet.”

“I don’t know if I sh-should put it back in at all.” I mumbled quietly, finally able to tear my eyes away from the machine.

“It is a safety device.” Doc pressed cautiously. I knew on a clinical and strategic level that he was right, that it could prevent me from dying like Theseus’s ship core. It could suppress cardiac failure brought on by sudden critical system failures. But it had still just put me through hell.

“Oh, yeah, I feel so s-safe about that thing now.” I rolled my eyes. I was glad to see that whatever brain damage I’d sustained hadn’t claimed my sense of sarcasm. I couldn’t live without being a smartass. I mumbled under my breath, “she tried to delete me.”

“… Delete you? You mean Cassandra was trying to kill you?” He asked with a frown.

I shook my head. “I think if Cass… Cassandra wanted to kill me, she would have. No, I meant me. I tried to delete me. I mean-not me, I didn’t want to del…ete myself, but I mean the… me that- my dampered self. The me I become when all my em-em-emotions and my self get l-locked away like that.”

Doc stared into my eyes, worry written plain on his face as I tried to piece together the words to express what happened, for several moments, like he was examining my thoughts through my eyes. “Is that… a thing?” He asked, clearly uncertain if he was overstepping the boundaries of his knowledge.

“No, I don’t… don’t think so. She couldn’t figure out a way to do i-it, anyway.” I shrugged, letting out a sigh. “Just… the fact that she had total c-control, and that she was l-looking. It’s… like… imagine if you could see a god trying to figure out how to sm… smite you.”

His stare didn’t relent “You’re not a file, Meryll, you can’t just be deleted… and there is no ‘she’, is there? It’s just how your mind interprets having your ego suppressed. I can’t pretend that I know exactly how this works since your situation is so unique, but it’s probably best not to assign agency to something like that, it’s not healthy.”

I nodded slowly. Yeah. I was under for a long time, I probably came up with some unhealthy coping mechanisms to get through that ordeal. There was no separate normal Meryll and dampered Meryll. And one certainly wasn’t going to eliminate the other. Despite Doc’s reassurances, though, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. There was just something too real about what I’d experienced near the end of that session too. If she wasn’t real, then what did the actions she tried to take mean? I shook my head at him. “I don’t know, Doc. I-I just don’t know.”

Doc opened his mouth to say something else, but at that moment, there was a knock on the door, both loud and gentle. We both turned to see Ray standing in the doorway, hunched over the open hatch with one claw resting gently on her side, the other against the door she’d just gotten our attention with. “Really Doc?” I swung my legs slowly over the side of the bed, preparing to make room. “I thought you’d get to Ray as soon as you f-finished with Aisling.”

“He did.” Ray huffed, trying to sound strong, but her voice strained against her will. “Just hurts again.”

Ray’s condition was concerning. Her implant was a medical device made to efficiently regulate the stabilizing chemical that all Mammons need to survive. It was supposed to make her medication last longer, but if it was damaged, it could have terrible consequences. I immediately pinged the device, and frowned at what I saw. It was running, but it was struggling. That could potentially be worse than if it was just a lump of still metal sitting in her side. I couldn’t tell what was wrong from the software side of things, but there must have been a component that was fried by Skygraves’ attack. I wasn’t sure if her pain was from some malfunction of the device, or if there was a physical component irritating her body.

“Doc, you’re gonna have to open her up.” I offered, getting to my feet.

“I don’t have the parts to replace her implant, Meryll. And I don’t feel confident trying to remove it from her.” He spoke quietly, moving to grab a bottle of pills from the shelf. “The best I can do is help her manage the pain and hope the device can sort itself out.”

Ray nodded, acknowledging the truth of the matter, probably for the second time, as she wrapped her claw around the bottle.

“Maybe you’ll figure something out if you… if you look at it, though?” I grimaced. Ray was going to be okay, right? We could fix her, right?

“I’ll get through it.” Ray forced a tired smile for me, concentrating for a moment to open the safety lid off the bottle with claws entirely too large for handling such a small thing. I suppose if you were born with less dextrous digits, you’d grow accustomed to finding your own way to manipulate objects meant for baseline humans. “It’s not like I can’t take stabilizer the old-fashioned way.” She gave a weak chuckle, trying to reassure me.

“Still, maybe have Mouse look at it? He’d know how to f-fix… a machine like that, maybe. Right?”

“I’ll think about it.” Doc mumbled. I was glad to hear it, even if he was just saying it to placate me. “After I get Mouse back in working order, that is. Can you go grab him before you go back to Aisling, Ray?”

Ray nodded, tilting her head down to swallow a couple of pills, delicately fished from the bottle, before I leaned over and hugged gently against her massive arm, taking care not to apply pressure to her abdomen. I couldn’t resist her softness after it felt like so long since I’d been able to hug her. She tapped a couple claws gently on top of my head, the bottle preventing her from giving me a proper pat, before I released her and let her be on her way.

As soon as Doc and I were alone again, I took my position back at the makeshift floor bed, anticipating the prompt arrival of a grumpy teenager with floppy arms. “I… was kinda afraid to ask before, but it sounds like Aisling is…”

“Just a flesh wound.” Doc said with surprising amusement. “But seriously, I’ve seen her in worse shape. She is on strict monitored bed rest for the next 72 hours, doctor’s orders. But she’s had much closer calls than this.”

I nodded, a sense of relief washing over me. I couldn’t live with myself if Aisling had died for me. “So nothing vital hit or anything?”

He scoffed, a soft smile growing on his face “Somehow. As long as you don’t count ‘a shitload of blood’ as vital, but that’s easy enough to replace. I swear, if Skygraves really wants immortality, he should probably be looking at the captain, not you.”

That got me to let out a good-natured laugh for the first time since I woke up. It was reassuring to see Doc being so lighthearted. His levity was a good barometer for things being under control. “And how are you holding up? We’re lucky at least our m-medic got away from this uninjured. And you got to show up your old ‘fr…iend’ to boot.”

“I won’t lie, that was cathartic.” He chuckled, cleaning up some of the empty packages of spent medical supplies used on his previous patients off of his countertop and into a bin. “But finally putting Bill in his place is secondary to safely getting my crew out of danger.”

“Thanks for that, by the way. You really saved the day.” I gave him a big smile. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be needlessly ripped open on a lab table right now, and the rest of the crew would either be dead, fleeing without me somehow, or mounting a crippled suicide mission trying to rescue me.

“Yeah, it was my turn.”

I raised an eyebrow, tilting my head and silently asking what he meant by that.

“Oh, don’t you know? We have this little wheel that says who’s turn it is to save everyone’s asses. Like a chore wheel. It’s in the group messages, I’m surprised you missed it.” He gave me the biggest shit-eating grin that made me laugh again. “I’ve been in the opposite position plenty of times, Meryll, and I’m sure I will be again. I don’t hold debts to people I trust. I’m happy to contribute to our record of just barely surviving a hostile encounter.”

That led to an uncomfortable thought. “So does stuff this bad happen a lot? Like, are we going to be constantly dealing with these kinds of brushes with death?”

Doc shook his head. “Actually, this was closer than most. We get into some pretty dire situations, but it’s rarely the entire crew down for the count like this, and some of us took some pretty serious injuries this time.”

“I’ll say.” Came a dour voice from the doorway. I turned to see Mouse standing in the center of the doorway. He had his usual angsty leer on his face, but it was dulled. The fire inside him had been squelched, and the cause was obvious. Both of his arms lay limp in their sockets, his hands with dead, open palms dragging along with the motions of his torso. Mouse hated his cybernetics, and for the time being, failing to emulate the parts of him that they were made to replace was a constant reminder of their existence.

“Mouse.” Doc nodded, his demeanor becoming more clinical. We both knew that Mouse was neither in the mood for lighthearted banter nor would he want to be pitied and fawned over. Mouse just wanted this fixed. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I hope you understand why I saved you for last.”

“Because I’m not in medical danger.” Mouse deadpanned, walking over to the examination table. “But you haven’t seen Shaw.” He just grimaced at the bed, staring at the paper sheets as if they were the ones that did this to him. It took me a moment to realize that he was trying to figure out how he was supposed to mount onto it without using his arms.

“Shaw has an inert chunk of experimental silicon he stole from a back alley brain surgeon shoved up against his brainstem.” Doc rolled his eyes at just how ridiculous that very true statement was. “His condition is beyond me. Plus, he’s showing no symptoms that his body’s rejecting it, so small miracles.”

Doc walked up to the boy and made sure Mouse was watching as he took his right arm and draped it over the table, making certain he had Mouse’s consent as he did it. “No need to sit your whole body up here. You’re going to have to walk me through this. I get that I’m the best one for the job, given everyone else’s injuries, but I’m no engineer, you saw that much when I worked with you.”

Mouse huffed impassively “Yeah.” I had to wonder just how bad of an assistant Doc had made for repairing the cargo bay.

“After I get one working, I can assist you with the other, alright? Now, where do we start?”

—

To say that Mouse was unenthused to be instructing someone else on the finer points of his arms’ operation would be an understatement. He hated even acknowledging them in any other situation, and now they were right up on display, front stage, with someone examining them with clinical scrutiny.

I tried to get up and leave the room early on, to spare Mouse a degree of embarrassment, but Doc insisted that because I’d just suffered traumatic brain damage, I was in no shape to be wandering the ship alone, and needed to be monitored. I settled back into my floor bed and resolved to pretend to fall asleep instead. That meant facing the data stream, and I couldn’t help but covertly watch the scene from the sensor array, anyway.

The arm repair was tedious, and the fact that they were bleeding edge experimental tech became obvious quickly because Mouse wasn’t even confident he knew what he was doing with them. He confided in Doc at one point that while he’d done minor surface repairs on them in the past, he’d never had a complete failure for either of his arms like this. It was going to take some experimentation to make them operable again. With Mouse’s expertise, it was hardly apes bashing rocks against walls, but it was wearisome to be sure.

I couldn’t help but flinch when I saw Mouse squirm and shiver as Doc reactivated the nerve sensors in the arm, allowing the signals from the rest of Mouse’s body to reach the arm and vice versa. There was some experimental poking and prodding after that to ensure that Mouse could still feel what he should be feeling from the arm. It wasn’t moving, but he reported feeling from it, so that was a start.

After an hour and a half of peeling back synthetic skin and prodding at the confusing, twisting internal mass of silicon, carbon fiber, and exotic metals, I was surprised to see Mouse light up with the most subtle smile as the pair got a finger to twitch in response to effort. It seemed like the repair process was going to be a long ordeal. These were not simple prosthetics, but a serious attempt by a defunct corporation to emulate the functionality of actual human limbs. So of course it wasn’t going to be a quick repair.

And here they were, grafted onto a boy who was doubtless prepubescent when they’d done it to him. Coaxing him into a contract he had no way of interpreting, offering a child the illusion of the love and care he’d been denied, only to use him and throw him away. Mouse was walking proof of the callous cruelty of our corporate overlords, and he was left to deal with the aftermath.

There would be never be a repair service trained to work with him. There would never be marketed replacement parts he’d be able to find if something should mechanically fail. There would be no one to go to for replacement if they don’t adapt to his growth as they were supposed to. It was depressing knowing that Mouse had a whole life ahead of him of experimentally tinkering with his unwanted cybernetics, hoping he can keep them functioning correctly. He’s very fortunate to have a talent for such things. That, and a smoldering hatred for the kind of people who had done it to him. Spite was a good motivator.

Eventually, I got bored watching what was happening in the same room as me through cyberspace and contemplating the harshness of Mouse’s lot. I was sure I’d hear an exclamation if they made some kind of breakthrough. So I decided to do a check-in on the others.

Flickering through the feeds, I saw Ray sitting in Aisling’s bedroom while the captain dozed away, snoring heavily. She lay with a blanket pulled up to her waist, concealing half of the medical patch covering her hip. It was obvious that one of her legs was bent out over the edge, still covered with blanket, but hanging over the air. In addition, her arms were splayed haphazardly above her head at odd angles, the faint red of blood seeping into the bandage wrapped around her injured hand. Her chest heaved up and down with each open-mouthed breath as she snored like a chainsaw, a thin line of drool hanging from her lip.

I was barely able to contain a giggle at the ridiculous sight of our captain at rest. Was that how she always slept? Was that why she always turned off her sensor array at night? She was always so tactical and composed about how people saw her, but in the privacy of her own room, she was a very messy sleeper. It was actually kind of cute. I saved a screenshot of the scene.

Next to her, Ray seemed to be in a state of meditation. Her expression betrayed how poorly that was going for her. Between the cacophony of Aisling’s sleep and her own drug-dulled gut pain, I doubt she was able to concentrate much on her thoughts. That, and I knew she usually used incense for that, and Aisling probably wouldn’t appreciate her burning it in her room. Looking at Ray suffer made me wish Doc had shot Skygraves.

I decided to turn my attention elsewhere. Joel was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was in the mess hall, my only internal blind spot after Skygraves’ implant destroyed the sensor array and sent me reeling for the crime of sending a network ping. Some part of me that decided that Joel was an acceptable target for schadenfreude was a little disappointed that I’d missed watching the big guy try to work his way down stairs with a crutch.

And lastly, our less than esteemed guest. Shaw was still sitting in Aisling’s chair at the helm. I did a brief check to make sure that he hadn’t been tampering with Aisling’s terminal. I saw a few traces of files being opened, but it was all just stuff related to logistics, mostly a loose log of inventory and mathematical notes of planetary positions for places we’d made port in recently, and he hadn’t tampered with any of it.

Hilariously, I had been correct in my assumption that Shaw would be a smartass with the comms terminal while we were still in range. Skygraves himself had sent begging messages to Aisling offering ludicrous sums of money for my return with veiled threats of cooperating with authorities if she refused. Shaw had responded by simply appending 10 more zeroes to the end of the offer with a sarcastically polite customer service message. The port authority had also sent a threatening message about our unscheduled departure and a list of wrongdoings quite a bit longer than the crimes we’d admittedly actually done. To which Shaw replied ‘Actually, can we land again? I could be wrong, but I swear that I left my trousers on your mother’s nightstand.’

His interest was no longer in the terminal now, though. Instead, he leaned back in the chair, an uncharacteristically solemn expression on his face. In his hands, he slowly turned the hunk of once-shifting black metal that he could usually command with the power of his mind. It sat inert, locked into the last shape it held, a slightly convex plate he’d intended to use to shield himself from a bullet. He stared at the strange metal in his hands, a deep, frustrated sigh coming from his throat as he concentrated on it.

I suppose I didn’t really understand how important that implant was to Shaw. The guy was a scumbag who I wished we’d been able to abandon back on that colony, but he had pulled through when we needed him to pull off a vital bit of skullduggery so we could make our escape. I had certainly been in no position to hack the hangar bay and rail system myself, given the circumstances. And seeing how despondent he seemed at the sight of the formerly elegant shaped tool actually made me pity him.

Curious, I pinged for Shaw’s implant. And was surprised that I got a response. I was already familiar with how to tap into the implant after I’d had to suppress it for some time from when he was less of a guest and more of a prisoner. I didn’t completely understand all of the workings going on inside. I didn’t even really understand what the device did. I knew that it somehow allowed him some kind of mental control over that particular metal, despite the fact that he had no psionic resonance. It was some scientist’s experimental personal project, and the internal workings of the software were not user friendly, nor were they terribly well-documented within the code itself.

After emulating pieces of the code in my system, though, I was able to make some sense of them. The device had indeed survived the EMP, but it had rebooted. It wasn’t made to be rebooted. It had no automated startup sequence. Without digging into his brain to hook up a physical terminal to it, it would never do anything again. That is, unless you know someone with access to a psychic network. All I had to do was coax it into launching a single function, and…

Shaw let out a sharp grunt, screwing his eyes shut for a moment and pulling one hand to his head as a small spike of pain passed through him, then faded as the device began to function. He opened his eyes in time to see the metal slip out of his hand, disappearing to wherever it went inside of him. His eyes opened wide, and he held a hand out, where a small liquid ball of floating metal materialized from his hand. He let out an astonished huff, an enormous smile growing on his face as he jumped to his feet, holding his hand out as it shifted into the knife he’d once threatened my life with, then in quick motion, a spanner, a screwdriver, a fork, a floating metal plate again, and then he closed his fist as it disappeared into him once more. “Ha! Haha! Yes!” He cheered, pumping his fist into the air.

I recorded it to taunt him about it later. Then I sent a message to the comms terminal, turning up the speaker volume to ensure he heard the ping. He turned to see the words ‘Thanks, asshole. Now we’re even.’

He let out a laugh, then turned to look at the sensor array “Not even close, you beautiful insane starship, but it’s a strong start!” he exclaimed joyously, letting out another hearty laugh my way. I rolled my eyes, but smiled at his genuinely excited reaction to having his toy back. Maybe the jerk was growing on me.

My examination of the crew complete, I relaxed into genuine repose. I did still feel kind of tired. Unconsciousness from biochemical shock was hardly restful sleep after all. As I lounged in cyberspace, waiting for sleep to take me, I found my connection a little easier to manage despite not being in the core module. I still had only a ghost of the absolute control over the ship I had in sensory deprivation, but it strangely felt more cooperative than it had been during our violent jaunt through the corridors of the Venus colony. Perhaps I was just acclimating better after months of constant immersion. Maybe this was some kind of positive side effect of brain damage. Or I was just projecting my relief at getting to operate in cyberspace under normal circumstances after a series of tragedies. Who knows?

All I knew for sure is that I kept getting giddy relief every time my eyes wandered to the system clock buzzing by in normal time. And dread whenever they were drawn to the ominous black box in the corner of my vision; the constant reminder that from somewhere out there in the system, I was being hunted.