Theseus

I was beginning to look forward to losing my dependence on sleep again. I had that same dream that night. The same dream where I’d felt so helpless and then everything I was got destroyed by the approaching darkness. Sitting in the mess with the others, I stirred the remains of the fried bits of eggs and potatoes around my plate idly as I tried to process it all.

Recurring dreams were supposed to mean something, right? Sure, it had only happened twice, but it felt like something was eating at my subconscious. I couldn’t identify it at all, though. It was like there was something deeply wrong, but so far away that it couldn’t touch me. Was I forgetting something?

“You look chipper.” Aisling muttered as she walked in to join the rest of her crew, grabbing a plate and filling it with food from the pan. As she began to pour herself a cup of coffee, she said “I thought you’d be excited. Soon as you finish up here, you get to go back to your favorite place on the ship again.”

I set my fork down “Yeah, I’m okay, just… not hungry I guess. Bad dream again.”

“Not surprising, you did get kidnapped by pirates after a near-death experience and given unprecedented mental trauma and involuntary surgery.” Doc said in a half-joking tone. When he put it like that, it felt obvious.

I took a deep breath. Perhaps I should just forget about it for now. They were right, it was a bright new day, and it was time to immerse myself in lubricant again. I put on a smile and pushed my chair back “Alright. I’ll see you all on the other side.”

I had already had an examination that morning, and Doc had cleared me to reenter the core module, but not before I got some food in me. That worked for me, it meant I wouldn’t have to come out for another full day. But now that I was walking up toward my heart, my restlessness was starting to peak. I just had to do a little more walking to get there, undress, immerse myself, and flip a switch, and Theseus would be ready to go back online. I would be ready to go back online. And I’d be able to see what I could really do when the obstacle of faulty hardware had been removed.

It felt like it took forever, but within minutes, I was sitting on the edge of the open sphere again, looking down into what should have seemed like a claustrophobic enclosure, but I knew that once it was filled and the lights were turned on, it would be true freedom.

I jumped down and stood waist-deep in the thick fluid. Closing my eyes and reaching out to the mechanism in the room, I didn’t waste another second before I started the immersion process, the lid closing and the chamber beginning to fill.

I didn’t want to wait. I plunged my face down into the pool and exhaled. I had found that the jarring process of changing my lungs’ ‘modes’ was best done like pulling a bandage off. I let all the air out and let my lungs fill with lubricant. It had become easier every time I did it, but the three day wait had admittedly made my return a little more difficult and I felt myself momentarily choking again before I was able to take in a full breath of the wondrous fluid. The tank was full after a moment and I began floating, losing my sense of gravity and the chilly air that I’d started to grow accustomed to. I could only hear my own gentle breathing as my lungs settled, and then…

The lights flashed on, and emptiness washed over me. I stared into it and felt relief. Three days without this calming bliss had been enough. I felt at home. Right. Like my mind could finally take a break. I quickly lost track of time, allowing my mind to go blank. I suppose that one might call it meditation. Or a blackout. I wanted to liken it more to a computer that had been left working for entirely too long and had just had the opportunity to restart and run its boot sequences again: clearing memory, running diagnostics, starting all my systems from scratch. It was a release of mental tension that was hard to describe to someone who hadn’t experienced what it was like to have a starship grafted to their mind. I was home. I was awake.

I received a ping. I wasn’t ready to check it yet though. Just another few minutes of this bliss. It was when multiple pings started coming in from the same place that I grunted and closed my eyes. What I saw was a whole new experience. With my mind’s eye, I looked around, but it felt more intuitive than it did before. I could see a reflection of myself in my map of the ship. It was like I was a virtual avatar rather than a disembodied ghost. The lines of my map were clear, and I shifted seamlessly between the rough memory of the ship’s halls and the detailed sensor data I was receiving. It felt like my mind was moving rapidly, catching and processing the data into readable arrays that I could parse quickly as they appeared. Various bits of system data flowed in and out of my mind as I cleared them with hardly a thought. I reached out like I had before, and in my mental view of the data stream, a panel appeared as if it knew I had wanted to check my messages. Another ping.

It was Aisling. ‘Whaaaaaaaaaat?’ I typed into her text file, turning my sensor arrays at the bridge on and off to watch it fade in and out of my vision ‘Can’t a ship take a few minutes to settle in?’

“Been half an hour since you hooked yourself in, Meryll. Get yourself in the game.” Came her response as she typed away on a conversation with the port authority about our liftoff. She sounded serious, but at least she didn’t sound irritated.

Huh. It hadn’t felt like I was slacking off for that long. I guess I had just really been enjoying myself. I flipped through my diagnostics and found multiple unfamiliar pieces of hardware from when I’d last been in the core. I expected two new engines, with the wings restored. It would give me much finer control, especially in atmosphere, and make me less reliant on the gas propulsion systems. I would have to get a feel for the new balance on the way to Earth though. I added the engines to the panel I’d been putting together specifically for piloting, taking the time to clean up the new interface the clean implants allowed so that it would be easier to read.

Moving on with my diagnostic, I noticed something odd. ‘Captain, I think the intercom might be broken.’ I reported immediately, seeing a few units that weren’t properly wired to the rest of the ship’s communication system.

“That’s for you. You need to learn to synthesize a voice, and I don’t need everyone freaking out over your electric screeching noises while you figure it out. Use the one in the back of the storage closet and you shouldn’t disturb anyone.”

That seemed sound, I’d been wanting to learn to communicate better as the core. There was another that just made me confused though. ‘Okay, that makes sense, but why is there one on the outside of the ship?’

Aisling sighed deeply and stopped typing to lean against the back of her seat “I told Joel to install the first one somewhere we couldn’t hear it.”

‘But sound doesn’t travel in space. I wouldn’t be able to hear it either.’ I noted, isolating the two systems for future use as well.

“He’s not the brightest.” She mumbled “I dunno, maybe you can blast some music on it or something to announce our arrival. It’s already installed, so whatever.” The captain rolled her eyes and returned to her text conversation.

I looked over the new additions a few more times, seeing mostly just touch-ups and repairs that I’d noted for Mouse before we landed, so I put the diagnostics aside for now. Instead, I peeked in on Aisling’s conversation. She had informed them that there may be minor errors with takeoff because they were running a brand new core. Not entirely false, I’d never taken off from land before after all. They acknowledged and now we were just waiting for our turn.

Looking around the ship, I marveled at the clarity my sensors gave me now, and happily noted that there wasn’t nearly as much strain on my mind as there was before. The new implants were doing wonders, like a broken bridge between the system and the cpu had been repaired. But there was one thing I still needed to test, and I figure it would probably be best to do it while we were still on the ground.

The psychic damper should have activated automatically if there was ever significant ship damage or another source of psionic shock, but I had to make sure it was operating. I didn’t exactly look forward to it though. The moment it was installed still stuck in my mind: That moment of total mental emptiness. It wasn’t the kind of soothing, meditative emptiness that came from resting in the void. It was cold and sterile, like my mind going on auto-pilot, almost out of my own sense of control entirely. It had shut down everything, presumably so that my mind couldn’t transfer the horror of losing a part of myself to my vitals.

Never the less, I had to at least let it run once more. I pinged Doc ‘I’m about to test the damper. What’s a safe maximum duration I can set?’

“Start with… two seconds.” Came his reply “We don’t know exactly how it’ll react, we need a small test first. I’ll watch your vitals.” He put his tablet aside and started watching the various health monitors at his station closely.

That sounded like it would be too short of a time to learn anything to me, but I supposed that I could always do it again if I had to. ‘Beginning test’ I sent before launching a manual activation script for the new hardware.

Another spike of pain followed by calm. And then that distant mental emptiness returned. I only saw the numbers, code, and machinery surrounding me as it was. Literal data that I had no way of interpreting anymore. I didn’t feel Meryll anymore. I was Theseus. I was the ship and nothing more. And yet, at the back of my mind, there was still a part of me that was watching. Unable to act. Trapped in a loop that kept me isolated from reality.

That distant conscious part of me looked to the system clock. It seemed to be ticking up slowly, milliseconds in what should have been seconds, and that small part of me that was locked away behind a digital wall felt like it wanted to panic. The passage of time had slowed to a crawl, and I could feel myself able to react at much higher speeds. I couldn’t reason though. I could only observe and perhaps run existing scripts. My creativity, my self-awareness, my consciousness, however, was all gone. The part of me that had the capacity to act was, in that moment, a computer and nothing more. And all I could do was watch as the clock passed at an agonizingly slow pace. The only thing moving through my mind was the system cycle count of the test script I’d started.

It felt like a full half hour had passed, and the clock still crawled forward. I couldn’t say that I was becoming bored, I don’t think that I was even capable of feeling bored in that state. I was simply on standby. Idling like a good computer awaiting orders.

Suddenly, my sense of self rushed back to me, like the end of an out of body experience. My eyes went wide and I had to take several heavy breaths to try to calm myself down. Two seconds. I held my legs close to my chest, giving myself a hug in an effort to calm down. I had been out for two seconds, but it had felt like I had just become a robot for half an hour. The thought of having to spend any extended amount of time in that state was horrifying. I was fully aware of myself somewhere deep down, but it was like that wasn’t me in that frozen moment in time. It felt like everything that actually made me me was just a flaw in my programming. A file gone rogue that wasn’t operating how it should.

“Meryll? Meryll, are you okay in there?” I heard Doc calling me. I immediately pinged him back without closing my eyes to look ‘Two seconds was entirely too long! I am never using this thing!’

It took me a few moments to work up the courage to give up the sight of the void. Closing my eyes again, I saw that Doc had a surprised look on his face “Really? Ship cores can usually safely run a damper like this for hours if they need to. What exactly happened? Your vitals were far calmer than your baseline for the duration of the test, but they spiked afterward. Are you okay in there?”

Hours. I extrapolated the numbers quickly. I had a roughly 15 minute perception of time per second. My perception was slowed by nearly 1000 times. An hour would feel like more than a month as a hollow shell of myself ‘No. Nonono not doing that no WAY would I run this system for that long. Get this thing off of me.’ I reached up behind my head and tried to tug the device away from me, but it was secured tightly, and I was still aware enough to realize that pulling objects out of my brain by force would be a bad idea.

“Meryll, calm down, your heart rate is spiking all over the place. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

I let go of the damper and did as he said, taking a few more deep breaths until I felt my heart starting to slow down again. Rationality began to return as I was able to shelve the trauma of what I’d just experienced, at least for the moment. Then I tried to describe it again and quickly lost my grip all over again. ‘I don’t even know how to describe what happened. It was like everything I was had been swallowed up and replaced, thankfully temporarily, by some kind of blank AI. A soulless husk that could perform functions if it needed to, if that’s what was asked of it, but it couldn’t think or feel or remember or or’ It was hard to tell that I was crying within the lubricant, but my eyes hurt and I felt that familiar emotional release. I couldn’t keep typing.

“Alright, Meryll, you’re okay now, yeah? Look into the void, go to your calm place. You can relax. It’s over. Deep breaths.”

It was hard to focus on his words, but after I opened my eyes and took a few breaths as instructed, I started to feel myself stabilizing. I would be alright. I was out of that thing now. The void helped. It made me calm. It felt like safety.

I closed my eyes and continued recounting my experience to Doc ‘But the worst part is how long it felt. Two seconds felt like forever. Maybe half an hour, that’s my best estimate. And the whole time, all I could do was stare at the timer variable counting down until it stopped. I had no control at all. Nothing.’

Doc pursed his lips. I was likely the first human person who had ever experienced what it was like under the influence of a psychic damper, and the fact that this was the kind of thing that one faced under its influence was both fascinating and terrifying to him as well. “Okay, look. I had no idea that something like this would have an effect on your… temporal perception. But the damper is a device that could very well save your life.” He tried to speak calmly “It only needs to counteract the worst of the shock response. In the dire case where you actually need it, it will only last… at most, I’d say four seconds. After that, your mind should be able to parse it like any other sense of pain.”

‘I can’t Doc.’ Was all I wrote at first, a knee-jerk reaction to being told I might one day have to go through that hell again. I opened my eyes and tried to catch my breath again. Four seconds. Twice as long as I’d just experienced. An hour of ego death. It terrified me more than the thought of actually dying in space wreckage. I typed blindly ‘Don’t try to talk me into this, I’m disabling it, I just can’t. You didn’t feel what I just felt, NOTHING is worth this.’

“Would it be more manageable if it was a shorter time?” he asked slowly, trying to keep me calm

I had to think about it for a long moment, still emotionally devastated by the test I’d just run. I was reluctant to type anything back, but finally I managed ‘How long?’

“Just for testing, until we can figure this out, maybe find a solution, how about we test it in intervals of…” he shook his head slightly, trying to come up with a ballpark figure “Ten milliseconds.”

Ten milliseconds. 1/100th of a second. A ten second burst of the alien emptiness that I’d felt. It certainly sounded more reasonable. Perhaps I could hold myself together for that long under its influence. Maybe I could become accustomed to it. Microdose my way to being able to withstand that horrid limbo. Just for emergencies. ‘Maybe.’ I finally responded.

I couldn’t make that decision right now. I needed to think. I needed to do something, anything else. A good distraction where I could really let loose and feel like myself again, just for a bit.

Just then, Aisling pinged me to the bridge and I heard “Alright, Meryll, ready to fly?”