Theseus

Doc hovered over me on the examination table, his eyes fixated on my red-mottled patch job bandage, now unwound so he could look at the carnage I’d inflicted on myself. It was past lunch time, and he’d cleared Collins to be moved to a ‘private room’ now that she wasn’t a critical coma patient, allowing me the honor of becoming the centerpiece of the infirmary once again. I knew he was judging me, and I just stared at the ceiling, embarrassed that he had to clean up after my bad habit again.

“Well... it could be worse,” he grumbled, but I could tell he wasn’t happy to see me self-injuring. “Meryll, I thought you said you had these urges under control.”

“I do!” I exclaimed, then flattened my indignity as I continued, “I mean... I-I did. Look, I wasn’t e-even really fully conscious when th-this happened. I just woke up from this awful nightmare and I was st-still... there. I was still in pain...”

“The noise?” He asked, curiosity in his voice. Of everyone on the crew, Doc knew the most about that bizarre dream, where I’d remembered the sad state I’d been in when I was brought into this world. That nightmarish mind-drilling noise that he gave the same cautious appreciation I did when he spoke of it.

I shook my head “No, it wasn’t a fla...shback. I think. Part of it was kind of a flashback s-sort of? But not of anyth-thing real. It wasn’t recall. I just got confused.”

His shoulders deflated a little. Even if it had hurt me, I knew he would have been at least a little elated if I’d had another memory recall dream like I had in the aftermath of my first encounters with Lily, but I hadn’t remembered anything of my time in Foundation’s hands since then. Doc had an academic interest in my case, and was writing some kind of thesis about me while he tried to help me recover my past. I knew he cared about my health first; there was no one I trusted as my physician more than him, but he was a researcher at heart.

“Is that the only injury you gave yourself?” He asked, and then before I could answer, he motioned his hand over my body. “Strip. I need to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself thrashing or something. You are clear to dive, I just need to make certain. That injury is shallow enough. The core lubricant can keep it clean.”

I smiled wide at those words and glanced to the core module longingly. Just a medical inspection away. I wouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t at least give some lip to the man commanding me to take my clothes off, though. “If only Ray were s-so forward,” I joked as I sat up and pulled my sweater up over my head. Doc was the only one who I’d told about my crush. We had that gay solidarity with each other that let us share more than we did with most. His preferences made the amount of time I spent in the buff around him way less awkward, knowing he had no sexual interest in me whatsoever.

“You really need to talk to that woman. We don’t have anti-fraternization rules, you know that, right?” He asked as he walked around me, inspecting my body for mysterious bruises cropping up. He stopped to inspect the small splotches of darkened skin at the small of my back while I slipped my shorts down, revealing all my skin and electronics to him.

Theseus hadn’t sustained any major damage for some time, but when it did, I felt it in my flesh. Pychosomatic damage, Doc called it. And my body seemed to like pushing the results of this incongruence between gigantic machine shell and human body to the base of my spine. I couldn’t complain, since most cores liked to shunt the damage to more critical internal organs. Thankfully, I’d gotten over my phobia of the psychic damper before getting shot in the engine gave me a heart attack, like Theseus’s last core.

“Doc, I got enough going o-on with my life. And so does she. I’m n-not gonna throw another wrench into that. She’s p-probably straight anyway.” I tried to look away from him as he came around the table and looked over my skinny legs, paying particular attention to the graft points of my component bay. That was always a sticking point for him because I’d lost some muscle mass since it was installed.

He leveled a glance up at me that screamed ‘seriously?’ when I deflected his suggestion. “Well, your back is healing nicely. I don’t see any other issues besides your broken gaydar.” He reached forward and clapped me on the shoulder, giving me a serious look, face to face. “Meryll... I know I don’t have much room to speak since my prospects on this ship aren’t the best—”

I smirked back at him and teased, “I know Joel’s straight, but you probably have a decent chance with Shaw, you know.”

He couldn’t help but give an indignant chuckle. “Not in a million years. As I was saying, I think you could use someone to... share a bed with.”

“Doctor, are you prescribing me with getting laid?” I laughed.

“Yes.” With a smile, he tapped me on the shoulder again before letting me go and turning back around to one of his terminals. “You could use the emotional support, too. I know Ray would provide. And you could certainly use an anchor to the physical world. I understand by now that you belong in a purely digital state most of the time, but you still have a body, and that means you could use somebody to ground you, and I don’t just mean me nagging you to keep your stomach full and your muscles from atrophying.”

I couldn’t deny that he had a point. I really didn’t have as much tying me to the physical world as I should. If I didn’t have my flesh to take care of, I would probably never leave the core module again. And the idea that I had to suffer through sensory acclimation every time I left the void would probably be easier if I had a little more to look forward to on this side. Not to mention that I just really liked being around Ray in the flesh. My stolen moments of cuddling with her in the kitchen were one of the few physical sensations I really enjoyed. But I still had my hangups.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. I’d said that before on the subject, though, and thinking about it only served to make me even more apprehensive about it. I’d learned that I needed to confront my problems, but that was for matters of life and death, not love. That was harder, somehow. “Am I good to go, then?” I asked, looking down at my open bite wound, still raw, but I’d at least stopped it seeping. I wouldn’t be able to keep a bandage in the core module, but I guessed I wouldn’t need one.

“Go on. We’ll determine check-in once we land.” He waved me off as I excitedly snatched my damper module off the countertop and bolted for the small catwalk scaffolding leading up to the core module.

Aisling had approved rearranging our patient because we needed to get back to the colony proper. Our work out here had finally dried up, and she didn’t feel safe there with all the noise we’d just made, anyway. I couldn’t reliably pilot Theseus in atmosphere without sensory deprivation, so she didn’t have much choice. I liked to think she would have done me the favor even if it was just for my comfort, though.

I felt my bare feet press down into the cross-hatched floor of the scaffold as I sent the electronic signal to open the sphere before me. Slats of metal unfolded from the sphere, a full hemisphere on the top half of the machine opening to reveal a hollow cavity within, half-filled with clear fluid shimmering against the overhead lights of the infirmary.

As the machinery did its work, I pushed my hair to the side again and slipped the damper module back in, shuddering once more at the sharp sting of unreality as the device integrated with my system again. Once it passed, I ran a diagnostic to make sure it was running properly as the core module finished opening before me.

With practiced routine, I sat down on the edge of the tank and lowered my legs into the slick, tacky fluid, and then sliding down to the center of the sphere before sending the signal to close it up.

I turned to watch the physical world disappear behind me, the infirmary at my heart being taken by darkness slat by slat until the sphere slid itself back into place around me. And just like that, I was sealed in. To the outside world, Meryll, the human being, was gone, swallowed up by machinery to become her greater self once more. But there were a few more steps on my end before it became truth.

The fluid began to rise around me, and I let my hands fall into the fluid first, feeling as the lubricant quickly climbed up around me, covering my arms, my stomach, my chest, and rising up to my neck. I shivered a little as it climbed over my bite, but it only tingled a little before the sensation numbed. The general chill that permeated my shell disappeared as the lubricant stabilized its temperature to the exact heat of my skin, eliminating one of the secondary human senses that held back my computational focus.

That was the point of the core module, after all. It eliminated all background sensory input, even those that we didn’t often engage with in any novel or conscious way. It allowed the brain to focus on what was important and become the grafted machine in whole.

The next part was always the worst, no matter how practiced I became at it. I exhaled deeply as the fluid reached my mouth, and lowered my head to submerge my head myself. Immediately, sound disappeared, the aural waves that managed to permeate the thick metal shell of the module quickly dissipating into nothing mere centimeters into the miraculous core lubricant fluid.

The primal animal instinct part of my brain told me that I was about to drown. It always did. But I’d learned to overcome its control of my body enough to make what came next as painless as possible. I pulled in a deep breath, as quick as I could, forcing the fluid down into my lungs. My body convulsed and choked involuntarily as my organs struggled to process what I was doing, until unnatural muscle memory formed over the last year took over and I felt my body relax into a rhythm of drawing in the fluid as though it were air. What had once been a painful several minute ordeal where I might not maintain consciousness had, over the span of months of practice, become a few seconds of discomfort before I let out a relieved sigh, gulping in a few steadying breaths of oxygenated core lubricant as the chamber finished filling to the very top.

The fluid gave a brief sensation of spinning, generating buoyancy so that I floated to the center of the tank with about a meter of clearance in every direction, and I felt the sensation of gravity disappear, senses that most took for granted relaxing and leaving me with an intense sense of focus. There was just one more physical sensation to be stripped away, and it was my favorite to be rid of.

Thin lines of metal began to arrange themselves in layers all around me, at the edge of the sphere. They spun slowly as they aligned themselves, creating a dizzying dance of coordinated metal and mechanism that quickly became faster as the alignment finished. I closed my eyes, looking briefly at the ocean of data that I could already parse much more easily than I had out in the physical world. It was better that I don’t stare when the module finished activating, I might damage my eyes.

And that’s when the uncomfortable faint shifting on the other side of my eyelids disappeared into a static light. I opened my eyelids again to acclimate to the glowing emptiness. All around me, there was nothing. I was no longer in a several meter radius sphere. I was no longer in reality at all. It was just white as far as the eye could see, with nothing at all in any direction. The endless void.

Logically, I knew that it was an optical illusion meant to normalize the strain on my eyes and eliminate sight as a factor, but my body and my brain believed what it saw. I’d been removed from the physical world in its entirety and become a purely digital being.

Closing my eyes once more, I was so pleased to see everything so clearly, able to concentrate on numerous factors of Theseus’s systems simultaneously, watching the entire ship’s sensor system at once and tracking background computations that I’d simply been trusting to automated scripts while I was bound to my flesh.

I was once again myself. I was Theseus in whole.

I swiped through to my comms panel and tapped my biometrics terminal to log my acclimation to the void. ‘Online.’ I reported to Doc, then quickly added, ‘Holy shit, I needed this.’

Doc rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re basking in relief in there. Metrics are normal. Go ahead and report to Aisling. I know she’ll have flight instructions planned.”

I was already there, sending an identical ‘Online.’ message to her terminal at the helm. I tapped her intercom and weaved my synthetic voice to talk to her. “Please tell me we’re flying today. Hell, right now? I need to feel something across my wings. Please?”

Aisling laughed, a smug grin growing on her face. “I have to admit, I never get tired of how eager you are for flight when you’ve been grounded a little while, but begging is new.”

“I am not begging!” I exclaimed. It was so much easier to make the on-the-fly tweaks to my voice to properly emote when I was in the core module, even flustered as I was by that accusation. “I’m just a little wound up after last night. Look, are we going or what?”

“Yeah, cleared for takeoff. I’ve already informed the crew. If you wanna stay in the air for a while, I don’t think anyone minds. Still waiting on clearance for a landing spot at the colony, so take your time.” She was indulging me. I knew she was. I think she was done being mad at me, and picked up on me trying to do better. I really was trying. I wouldn’t let her become that version of her I saw in my dream.

I was okay with the conditional praise. Even if it was just her attempt to use positive conditioning on me, I wanted it too much to complain. “Now we’re talking! I’ll put on my AI voice for Collins’ sake.”

I dug up my other synthetic voice system, this one much simpler, flatter, and made to sound slightly different from my own natural voice. It was what one might expect a core to use for ship-wide announcements. I tapped the whole intercom network. “Attention Theseus crew, two minutes until atmospheric action. Minimal turbulence expected. Please ensure that all loose material is secured.”

I warmed up my engines and did a quick check on all my wing joints and gas propulsion systems to make sure nothing was going to jam. Atmospheric flight was much harder than vacuum flight. Under most circumstances, I could navigate in vacuum without the core module. But when you had to account for wind, air pressure, local gravity, drag, and a dozen other constantly shifting factors, doing it without sensory deprivation was asking for trouble. Especially in a busy airspace.

Of course, there was always something that wasn’t working perfectly. I logged a jitter in my top side starboard inner wing panel for Mouse to look at later, but deemed it minor enough that I could compensate, then adjusted my flight panel to do so. Everyone seemed settled, and I hadn’t gotten a ping requesting delay, so I spoke up across the ship again. “All green, preparing for liftoff.”

I felt a smile crawl across my face as my hulking metal shell defied the pull of the moon below it, rising slowly over the ridge of the crater. I closed in my landing gear, turned Theseus to face the general direction of the colony proper, and began to accelerate forward.

As I sped up, my smile still growing as my sensors translated the wind whipping across my hull as if it were my own skin, I told myself that this was where I was meant to be. This was the freedom that I fought for. This was what it was all for. I didn’t know what they’d intended for me when I was created, but soaring through the sky and the stars was what I was truly made for.

I am Theseus.