Theseus

As usual in the run-up to dinner time, the stairwell smelled heavenly. A savory aroma wafted up from the mess hall on the bottom floor, filling the stairwell with a promise of warm nourishment. Ray’s cooking was amazing. I guess I didn’t have too many reference points for that, since besides her cooking, I’d only ever eaten made-to-eat packaged meals, some admittedly fantastic bar food back on Luna, the sub-par Ionian restaurant fare, and the absolutely abysmal powdered emergency rations we’d subsisted on for a month on the way here, but I certainly enjoyed everything she made.

I’d thrown on a loose sweater and a pair of oversized shorts, so I didn’t have to put my bloodstained hacker outfit back on just for dinner. It was an odd combination, but they were the first articles I grabbed from the clean pile, and I was used to wearing odd clothes.

As I slowly walked down the stairs, enjoying the meaty smell coming from below, I held the hand that wasn’t bound to the railing against my head. My headache had gradually worsened, even through the painkillers. I felt occasional pangs of pointed pain radiating to the back of my head in small waves, and I really hoped that filling my stomach would be enough to get me to fall asleep despite it and my ever-present digital awareness.

That, and I wanted to say hi to Ray. I wanted to say a lot of things to Ray. Definitely more things than I would say to her.

Hopping down the last few stairs despite my injury, I wandered into the utilitarian mess hall. It had clearly originally been intended to be some kind of workshop module before it had been swallowed up by the amalgam that was my shell, becoming a core part of Theseus before it was altered into a place to cook and eat.

I saw the massive woman at the stove turn her head to give me a smile before she returned her attention to a large steel pot on the stove. “Glad to see you’re still on your feet, Meryll. Long day, huh?”

I wasn’t exactly built strong or tall, but Ray, being a Mammon, towered over everyone in the crew, myself included. She easily had half a meter in height on me, and she had a wide, muscular build. Her arms made her look even larger. Bulkier than a human’s and covered in thick, black fur all the way up to the reddish-dark skin of her human torso. Each arm ended in a set of deadly-sharp, flexible claws rather than fingers. Her legs were much the same, a set of powerful, beastly appendages made for stocky strength and physical destructive power more than quick locomotion.

Her torso was covered in elaborate tattoos in black and red; the ritualistic marks of an Earthling warrior that mimicked gashes of color, presented swirling patterns, and strategically placed dots mottling her skin between the main features of the artwork across her skin. I couldn’t have imagined there was no purpose to the designs, so I gleaned that it had to be a tapestry of her accomplishments, obfuscated by tradition I didn’t understand.

Atop her head was deep black hair that grew only from the middle of her scalp, front to back, but was long enough to droop down and cover the left side of her head. That had probably been the inspiration for my ill-fated haircut, but she wore it far better than I did.

“You can s-say that again,” I smiled back and wandered up to her, not hesitating to lean affectionately into her arm as I looked past her to see what she was cooking. “You got a stew on?”

Ray nodded, leaning ever-so-slightly into my cuddling to compensate for my meager weight. She knew I liked her strong furry arms, and had never even attempted to discourage my affections. Despite her size and intimidating primal appearance, Ray was probably the most gentle person I knew, at least when she was outside of battle. She was strong in a way only a genetically engineered super soldier could be, but she tempered that strength with wisdom and care.

We sometimes joked that Ray was the entire crew’s mom. She took care of most of the domestic needs of the ship, like cooking and cleaning, she wasn’t afraid to use her ridiculous natural strength to help out whenever something needed lifting or hauling. She was always ready to offer an encouraging word when someone needed emotional support. And she was a formidable force in battle when violence was necessary. In hard times, I’d even seen her act as a trusted moral compass to Aisling’s ruthless cunning, reminding her of the worthwhile causes we fought for when the cost of our actions to the public started to become untenable.

“I figured our guest could probably use something that’s not difficult to eat for her first actual meal back in the waking world,” she explained whimsically as I watched her stir the pot of thick broth, fragments of vegetables swirling behind her ladle. It always looked intriguing to me how delicately she handled all the kitchen utensils intended for baseline humans in her massive claws. “And I accidentally overstocked on synthetic beef last we were in town. It has to be used up.”

“Well, it sm...ells good.” I said that pretty much every time I had a chance to compliment her cooking, and I was sure she was starting to notice, but it still made her smile. I had more to thank her for than food today, though. “You came out to s-save me...”

She stopped stirring the pot and looked back to me again, still smiling. “Someone had to carry all the speakers for Shaw’s plan to work. And I wasn’t going to sit still and do nothing while you were in danger. I don’t care if I become an Ionian urban legend if it’s to rescue a crewmate.”

Thanks to a very successful information suppression campaign, Mammons were still a secret to the outer colonies. If she was spotted out here, not only would the first successful case of a genetically manufactured human subrace cause an ethical and political panic in the populace and draw undue ire to their home on Earth, but it would be a pretty obvious clue where we were. So it was kind of a big deal that she would risk revealing herself.

“Besides, I’m tired of being stuck in the ship. I’m not like you, Meryll. Theseus doesn’t speak to me. I’m a warrior. An adventurer. I don’t like being cooped up inside for this long,” she lamented, her smile drooping slightly. “If I’m traveling through space, it’s one thing, but there are stories to be made here on Io, and it’s so disappointing that I don’t get to be a part of them. I was more than happy to take to the field again, especially if it was to rescue you. You’re special.”

I opened my mouth to refute her, but gave up quickly. Okay, yeah, it was pretty hard to deny that I was special. One of seven in all of the many billions of humanity was pretty unique. I instead just leaned into her more. “J-Just worried for you.”

“And I was worried about you.” She reassured me in a gentle, adoring tone that made me shiver. “And here we are, both fine. It all works out in the end.”

“Mm, I guess. Ais...ling demoted me, though. No more running my own o-ops.” I sighed, still a little sore on the subject. But after I’d been put in my place and had some time to think about it, I understood I wasn’t ready yet.

“Well, you did kind of screw up your very first one. Pretty badly.” Ray teased, reaching over with her other claw to pat me on the head.

“Ouch. Y-You too?” I chuckled.

“In sufficient quantity, bravery becomes foolishness.” She mussed up my hair a little, rubbing the tips of her claws over my scalp and eliciting some kind of noise that probably gave away what I was really thinking in that moment, and then returned her claw to the ladle in the pot. I let out a quiet hum of pleasure after her attention and chuckled at my hair tangling up.

I couldn’t help but smile even though I was being made fun of. I didn’t want to let her arm go. She was so warm and gentle and strong, and I just didn’t want to leave her side. It was getting pretty hard to deny the obvious. For the last couple months, I’d been crushing pretty hard on Ray. After Aisling turned me down that night on the way to Io, I thought I’d given up on trying to find that kind of connection within the crew, but it was becoming harder to stick to that principle. Over time, Ray had somehow wormed her way into my heart; our obvious physical differences be damned.

I didn’t dare actually say anything to her, though. I wasn’t exactly sure if she liked me that way or even where her orientation was, and that was an awkward question, no matter when it was presented.

Even though it had been a private moment that no one else had been privy to, I still felt guilty that I’d already taken my shot with the captain before her, as well. I didn’t want to make Ray a ‘second choice’. So I’d settled into the time-honored lesbian tradition of silently and indefinitely pining over my attraction instead of doing anything at all about it.

“You alright?” She asked, thankfully distracted enough by her cooking again that she failed to notice I’d just been silently staring up at her through my disheveled bangs for a few minutes. “You seem about ready to doze off.”

I kept my eyes locked on her for just another a moment and then let out a yawn, reluctantly letting her go of her warmth as I stretched my arms up, working out some of my stiffness. “Yeah... I’m hoping s-some food will put me to sleep... can’t dive right now, with Co...Collins in the infirmary.” I sighed wistfully. I think Aisling still didn’t understand that, to me, two full days actually was a very long time for me to be away from the void. I really should have pushed for her to arrange a situation for me to sneak in, but I knew I was already on thin ice. I’d bring it up tomorrow. “Maybe I should just le...learn to sleep with my eyes open?”

“Ahh, denied the call of your true home, hmm?” She nodded sagely. Ray had once called me a shaman for the way I was one with the ship. That I spoke with it the way some kind of Earthling mystic spoke to nature. That it was some kind of divine force that operated through me rather than just a technological marvel. I didn’t really see it as something so magical, but in her own way, Ray understood me. “Well, I’m not going to hold your eyelids up, so let’s fill your belly. See if that doesn’t help with your insomnia.”

—

I groaned in objection as the loud buzzing of the alarm pinged insistently inside my head. The moment I regained consciousness, the data stream flooded my inner vision and sealed my fate. I wasn’t getting back to sleep.

And besides, I couldn’t afford to miss work.

I dismissed the ping and blinked my weary eyes open, then stared up at the flat white ceiling of my room, impassionately listening to the air conditioner quietly whirring in the wall next to me, in blatant arrogant defiance of the heavy white quilt I had draped over me.

Something felt like it was missing. Like a profound emptiness I couldn’t define had wormed its way into my heart and left it wanting; yearning for something that was an intrinsic part of me. Something great and wonderful that was supposed to be here was absent.

I guessed I was hungry.

Which made the growing faint scent of bread and meat wafting through from the kitchen all that more inviting. I at least had time to grab a bite to eat before I headed out.

I convinced myself that I was ready to awaken from my fortress of warmth and abandoned sleep if it meant filling the yawning abyss that I reasoned must have been my belly. The quilt was tossed aside and bunched up against the wall, and I twisted to let my legs dangle over the edge. I briefly pondered over my feet not touching the floor. That bed had been entirely too high for me when I was a kid, and I still didn’t touch the ground now. If nothing else, I could say that at least dad had never had to replace it.

As my eyes wandered my room, memories blurring into place as I looked across the plain white furniture and remains of my childhood, I couldn’t help but appreciate that I’d finally had an opportunity to come home for a while. It wasn’t often someone needed my kind of qualifications in the suburbs of the Titan megacities, so I’d jumped on the opportunity when the job came to me. It meant that I’d get to spend a couple weeks hanging out with my family for once, and my parents had even invited me to stay with them for it, so I could save on my expense allowance.

I hopped down from the bed and stretched my limbs, taking care not to push the leg with my component bay on it too far for fear of disconnecting something. Then I walked to the plain white door and pulled the handle, revealing a modest but pristine kitchen right outside my door. The countertops, appliances, and decorations were all a trendy pure white that gave the whole place a clean overall atmosphere.

Dad snorted, his buzzed haircut peeking up from behind a terminal he liked reading the news on every morning. “Knew that’d get you up.”

Mom was the one standing over the stove, turning pancakes and tending to some kind of sad-looking meat lump on a second pan. She wore a heavy brown jacket and her red hair seemed striking to me this morning, for some reason. Maybe because it looked like she got in a fight with a pair of clippers and lost. It was messy and uneven. I raised an eyebrow, but I didn’t have long to ponder it before she jabbed back at dad without looking away from her cooking. “Smart-ass. It was my idea, Joel.”

I was so focused on mom that I didn’t catch Lily stepping nimbly past me, making her way toward the kitchen in front of me. “Something wrong, sis? You’re standing there like a statue. Still asleep?” She teased, brushing back her long brown hair so she didn’t get it in the food while she turned her attention to helping mom.

I stopped gawking and just smiled. I guess I was just happy to be home again after so long. Mom was occupied, and it looked like food would be done soon, so I took my seat next to dad and briefly leaned in to see if there was anything interesting on the news feed. Just some bullshit about the fighting on Deimos. I rolled my eyes. My parents bought into a lot of the obvious propaganda, but it wasn’t like I was going to be able to do anything about the underlying problem, so I wasn’t going to argue with them for no reason. “Got a computer in your brain and you still need to read stuff over my shoulder?” Dad snorted.

“What? I can’t use m-my actual eyes some...times?” I shot back, feeling a smug smile grow on my face. “You finally warming up t-to people with augs?”

“Bah.” He set the tablet face down on the table and looked at me proudly. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. Always been supportive, right hun?”

My mother turned around, smirking at my dad with predatory wit as she began to distribute plates across the table. “That mean you’re ready to get your leg replaced with a real prosthetic yet?” As soon as she got to me, though, I froze when she looked up into my eyes. Something about those sharp silver orbs drew me in and made something shimmer at the edge of that hollow emptiness I felt. I stared into her eyes in stunned silence for a few moments until she stood back up and took her seat at the table.

Something was off. I couldn’t tell what yet, but something was making me feel uneasy. That definitely wasn’t hunger I’d felt. In fact, I was starting to feel nauseous. Something was terribly wrong, wasn’t it?

“Seriously, something up, Meryll?” Lily asked, seeing my stunned, spacy look at mom. I glanced between each of them and felt like something was gnawing at the very edge of my mind. Trying to warn me of something. Of danger. A tragedy.

I was still looking for an answer to give her when I saw movement in the corner of my eye. Mouse came walking down the hall, yawning and stretching his arms, something he most definitely wouldn’t do because of his prosthetics. “Hey mom. Dad,” he groaned like you’d expect a moody teenager to greet their parents in the morning. “Hey Meryll, you still after that Mammon girl?” He asked in a teasing tone I would never hear from the young engineer.

I stammered out quietly, “Yeah...” I stared at him in now-terrified bewilderment as I tried to make sense of him. It took until he sat down before I managed to place what was bothering me and muttered out the words, “I don’t... h-have a brother.”

The four of them suddenly turned to stare at me, each of them giving me a glare with an accusatory air between them. Had I said something wrong? Had I done something wrong?

Searing pain erupted up my spine and drilled into my eyes, forcing them closed for a moment, and when I opened them, I stood, scrambling back in shock, pushing my chair back and almost stumbling over it as I backed away from the table.

On the other side of the kitchen, my mother, father, and sister were lined up facing me, lying limp in each of their chairs. Their mouths hung open in the echoes of terrified screams while their eyes stared, blank and dead. Each of them had a single black hole pierced through the center of their foreheads, thin rivers of red flowing down their faces, splitting and reforming as they dripped down into their clothes, staining the white they wore.

I stared at them in abject terror, my breath slowly getting heavier and heavier as I tried to piece together what just happened. They were dead. They were murdered. I was right there, and they were murdered right in front of me, and why did that happen? HOW could that have happened? My family, gone. We were JUST happy. We were JUST having breakfast with each other. WHAT HAPPENED?!

Worst of all, now that I stared into each of their faces, immortalized in morbid horror, I could no longer recognize them. I could no longer discern a single identifying feature beyond that they were my family.

I felt something cold, hard, and oh so very heavy move against my hand as my body twitched, and then suddenly, each of their eyes shifted to glare directly at me, no other part of them moving in the slightest. A deafening bang, the likes of which I’d never heard before, crashed through reality, and the all-consuming clinical white suddenly shifted to the darkest black as I felt a sudden pressure in my lower back. I took one stumbling step forward and the world shifted around me, like I’d just been shunted somewhere else. A new context overcame me.

I wasn’t home. I had no home. Nothing that happened before Theseus had been real. I had no family. I’d come to terms with that. But then why did those haunting eyes chase me until they were swallowed up in darkness. And what had been that noise?

My body shuddered as the pressure I’d felt stole my breath away. I drew in a ragged gasp of air and everything rearranged itself. A hand shakily lifted to my stomach and my fingertips felt wet.

Blood. Pain slowly spider-webbed out from the middle of my abdomen. The taste of iron was thick in my mouth. Ancient memory from behind the barrier of amnesia rang clear at the taste, but I couldn’t bring myself to swallow it down and suppress the agony of existence. I suddenly didn’t have the strength, even for that. My eyes darted wildly as I tried to make sense of the world around me. Outside of my own agonizing mortal frame, a pile of now-familiar ruined flesh marked the totality of my new awareness.

Soul-rending panic overcame me. I couldn’t help but examine them. Ray’s form, broken and still, her normally beautiful fur matted, torn, burned, and riddled with bullets. Lily, sprawled out and gasping from her bloody mouth. Mouse’s fiery gaze permanently quelled, one arm turned into mangled chunks of carbon and metal. Shaw, somehow impaled on his own black blade. Joel, still bleeding out, cursing and grasping at a rifle just out of his reach. Aisling watching me judgementally with those powerful silver eyes, now dull and dead, letting me know this was my fault.

I heaved unsteady breaths, trying desperately to hold my weakening knees steady through the dizziness that was becoming harder to ignore, to make sense of what I was seeing, to overcome the overwhelming pain that threatened to consume my shattered form. The blood in my mouth began dribbling down my chin as it overflowed.

They were all dead or dying, and I felt soon to follow. All my comrades. All my friends. My real family. As tears clouded my vision, I closed my eyes to escape the horrid scene before me, but that only made it clearer, the whole of the digital world replaced by a singular sensor image of the very thing that laid before me from a different angle, with my human body standing above the carnage.

I was gutshot. My body was a ghastly sight, my cringy hacker outfit heavily torn while I was covered in blood and scratches, skin pale with injurious anemia. One hand failed spectacularly at keeping what remained of my internal organs from spilling out of the hole in my sweater while the other hung loosely, a pistol dangling, spent, from one finger hooked over the trigger. Aisling’s custom pistol.

I couldn’t piece together how we’d gotten here, but I knew I did this. I destroyed them through my terrible decision-making. I failed them. I lost everything because I was too stubborn, too careless, too naïve, too... stupid. I was so stupid. I really did never learn, did I? And by the time I faced that, here I was, bleeding out alongside everyone I ever loved.

I watched as the image of myself somehow opened her eyes and turned her face up to look directly at me, a haunted expression of guilt washing over her fading, rheumy eyes. I felt myself grow cold, my body’s desperate gasps hitting an abrupt end, the rest of me finally seizing up entirely as I fell face-first into the pile. A sensation of freefall overcame me as the sensor image slowly burned to static and my thoughts faded into oblivion.

—

I started awake, drawing in a sharp breath and jolting up to a sitting position in bed. Pain. It hurts. IT HURTS. The words crashed through my mind, and before I could stop myself, I’d lifted my arm up to my face. I felt my teeth sink down hard into my own flesh. That metallic tang sent another wave of panic through me, and I crunched my teeth down harder with the faint sound of tearing flesh, closing my eyes as I tried desperately to bury one suffering with another.

The room remained silent, except for my hyperventilation and the sound of adrenaline pumping down from my head. It wasn’t that kind of pain. It wasn’t noise. My panic began to unravel. My eyes traced slowly around the room as sudden clarity returned to me, and the echoes of the doom I’d just experienced left my now-functional brain searching for solutions to a problem that wasn’t actually there. It took me a moment of panicked hyperventilation to clear the remnants of what I’d experienced from my head and let out a relieved sigh into my stinging arm.

I unlatched my jaw from my forearm and shakily brought it down to look at it in front of me. Broken skin and light bleeding. I’d injured myself, but not enough that the blood hadn’t already begun to clot. Still, I hissed as the consequences of my actions sent a delayed wave of actual pain through my arm. “Ouch...” I mouthed quietly, followed by a string of expletives. I wondered if I’d stayed in that state any longer if I would have clamped down hard enough to snap my bone, like I‘d once been capable of.

My hand still shaking, I tried to distract myself. I hastily scanned through my sensors, checking that everyone on board was alive and well. I knew before I started that they would be, but it was comforting after a dream like that to be certain.

I hadn’t dreamed in a while. Not since I’d vividly recalled my former self. A haunted, feral child steeped in persistent, inexplicable, hellish pain, only soothed by grievous self-harm or my empathic sister’s care and understanding. And before that, the nightmarish echoes of my lost memories haunting me in my first weeks aboard Theseus. Maybe my exhaustion and introspection after Aisling’s scolding disturbed me enough that I slipped back into those terrible corners of my broken mind. Why couldn’t I ever have good dreams?

I opened my eyes again and tried to put the dream out of my mind. It didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t Lily; I didn’t have the gift of prophecy. What I saw was just my screwed up brain messing with me because I failed. It was fragments of shattered memories playing off my guilt. I had time to figure all this out before I really fucked everything up. I just had to be a little more disciplined. That’s all. I just had to do better. And I could do better. I was good enough.

I stared down at my arm for a second longer before surrendering to the collapse of adrenaline and plopping back down on my mattress again. “This is why I hate s-sleep,” I grumbled to myself and stared up into the haphazard industrial piping that passed for my ceiling.