Theseus

“Alright, Meryll.” Doc spoke clearly inside my head. My vision came back into focus. Or at least I think they did. It was hard to tell with no frame of reference. But I had definitely been stirred from my torpor. A few restful hours with my brain in what Isabelle would probably have called sleep mode did a lot to sort through my thoughts and give me a much-needed emotional reset. “I’ll give you a few minutes to sort yourself, but then we have to talk.” He was starting to understand me a little too well.

I stretched my arms out and felt the blood pump into my poor under-utilized muscles. I’d curled up into the fetal position while I was resting this time, and I felt stiff. After my body felt sufficiently awoken, I closed my eyes and delved deep into the digital ocean, surrounding myself with the map of my shell and shifting my avatar into my heart, where I saw Doc staring up at my sensor array.

“How’d you know I was still in torpor?” I asked over the intercom.

“Biometrics. You’re a lot calmer than your baseline when you’re resting.” He started, then folded his arms. “I’m glad you were able to relax.”

I nodded, checking my mechanical metrics to make sure we were still on course and all my systems were running smoothly. “Yeah, I needed that. I felt kinda wound up. I guess recovering traumatic memories will do that.” I tried to smile at my own misfortune, but it quickly diminished as the reality of my past caught up to me.

“Meryll... I’m your doctor. I know I’m mostly here to care for your physical health, but you’re clearly going through more than that. Talk to me?” He asked.

“Yeah, I know. I kinda owe it to you after you spilled your whole thing with Skygraves, anyway.” I sighed. “So where do I begin? Just... tell you everything that happened?”

“What was going through your head?” He asked first.

“A lot.” I paused. I didn’t even know how to put it into words. It was like I was constantly being stabbed in my brain. That agonizing spike of suffering that accompanied new hardware burning itself into my mind, but amplified a thousand fold and drawn out across my entire childhood. “I... wasn’t sane, Doc. I couldn’t be. There was nothing left for me to give to try and keep myself from going completely nuts.” I admitted to him. “There was this constant painful... sound? No... not sound, but it was still a noise in my head. It was constant, droning agony on top of this sad sense of dread, forever, and it just got to me. It would get to anyone.”

I paused for a while to think more on how to describe it, and Doc took the opportunity to ask, “What were they doing to you?”

“Nothing! They were leaving me alone in an empty cell. No invasive monitoring equipment, no annoying doctors, no... needles poking into me. It was just me. Just me and the... constant pain. It had to be coming from my own head.”

“They may have been using something you couldn’t see in that cell.” Doc offered.

I shook my head. “Nothing like this was happening to Lily. It was just me.” I braced myself. I just had to face it. I had to get it off my chest and tell him the truth. “Doc, I was violent. I attacked Lily at one point. I bit her, and I felt the bone in her arm snap. I had to do something, anything, to make the pain stop, and I was so tired that it sounded like a good idea. Biting myself made me feel better, so maybe biting her will do something, since that wouldn’t even hurt me. I regretted it immediately because it hurt her so bad, and then I spent the rest of the dream in a straitjacket with a muzzle over my face.” I frowned at the inhuman, but necessary way that I was kept. “Like a crazed animal.”

Doc stared up at the sensor for a few minutes, parsing this and looking thoughtful. “But you don’t feel this pain now? You’re not so confused.”

I laughed silently into the lubricant. “You tell me. I’m the crazy one.”

“You’re not crazy, Meryll.” Doc reassured me. “You’re far too coherent for anyone to think that your perception is impaired at all. At least now. I believe you when you say it’s a memory. This kind of recall is unusual for a simple dream. But Aisling has the right idea. You’re a different person now. You don’t feel this... pain you used to experience anymore?”

“No, nothing I can remember since joining Theseus has been nearly as awful. Maybe they figured out some way to stop it?” I wondered. “Did something to stabilize me? A permanent solution that doesn’t need upkeep?”

“Or perhaps something changed in the environment. Maybe something Foundation hadn’t accounted for near your cell was affecting you and you alone.”

“I wish I’d remembered more, so we had more points of reference.” I mumbled.

“It may be a good thing you didn’t.” Doc mused.

“You think so?”

“Meryll, it’s quite obvious that this recall has... affected you. Perhaps you’re still just distressed by the experience and this will pass, but the little bit you did recover has already... done something to you. Surely you’re not blind to that.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah. I feel different. I keep getting this urge. Back then, I kept biting myself. My arm specifically. It... made me feel better. At least a little bit. It was just a distraction, but distractions helped. And ever since I woke up, it just feels like it would be nice if I...”

I opened my eyes and looked down at my arm again. I’d resisted that urge so far. It wasn’t like it was becoming any more insistent, but it wasn’t going away.

“If you hurt yourself?” Doc asked.

I shook my head. “No, I definitely don’t want to do that. I bled a little when I was doing it earlier, and that freaked me out. That’s probably why I’ve been able to deny it. I don’t know. I just want to have something in my mouth, I guess. Something to bite down on. And my arm makes the most sense to me.”

Doc nodded slowly. “You have an oral fixation,” he declared. “That’s not really so terrible. You can train healthier habits around it. It’s remarkable that this was something being suppressed entirely by your amnesia, though. Amazing what something like that will do. I’d have thought it would continue through muscle memory.

“I don’t think I want an oral fixation.” I told him.

“Well, you can certainly stymie it. Don’t give into that urge and it will get easier. But I’ll come up with some safer options than your own skin for you, in case you need it.” He pulled up his personal terminal and started a new page on his file about me, quickly tapping away about the things I’d just told him. “So you suffered chronic psychosis and violent outbursts due to... some kind of pain factor that we can’t define right now, and before you learned to lean on Lily, you developed an oral fixation as a coping mechanism. What else?”

I was kind of glad that he was becoming more analytical about this. It felt easier to let my guard down when he was treating it as something to observe rather than treating me like someone he had to handle delicately. It made him seem less... judgmental. “Well, I couldn’t really make sense of anyone but Lily and I. Cassandra showed up in the dream too, but she was also really fuzzy, like I could only barely remember her. Everyone else was just... they may as well not even have been there. They were like ghosts.”

“Well, like you said, it was a dream. That could just be an abstraction of your thoughts. Or perhaps these people hadn’t been important enough to you to commit their appearance to memory.” He sighed loudly. “Or there’s another mechanism we don’t understand yet at play here.”

“I think that was just how I saw the world. The personnel were monsters, not people. My head was really screwed up, Doc.” I shook my head. Looking back on it as I was now, that memory painted a clear picture: Whatever it was that was driving me to that state, I had not been sane. I had been too mentally unsound to be left to my own devices. “Let’s see, what else. Cassandra kept coming by my cell and berating me. I really didn’t want her to see me cry at first, but after she did, I kept hoping she would keep saying worse things. To make me feel tired and numb. Man, that’s sad when I think about it.”

Doc nodded. “That fits the profile we have on her. You were just doing what you could to make sense of things, and whatever was happening in your head was worse than putting yourself down. You must have had terrible self-esteem issues.”

I nodded. “I think she was making that worse. I was blaming myself for everyone else’s problems. I felt like I was holding everyone back since I couldn’t deal with the pain I thought everyone else was doing fine with, and I didn’t know what my psychic ability was.”

“You still blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault.” Doc mumbled to himself as I said that, but he paused immediately and turned to look up at the sensor with a serious expression. “You didn’t know back then, either?” He asked.

I shook my head. “Neither did Lily. Or Cassandra.” My eyes went wide for a moment. Wait. They didn’t know what my psychic ability was, either. Lily hadn’t even seen it in her visions. Did Foundation even know what I was capable of? Did anyone? I returned to the data stream. “Doc, I’m not sure if anyone ever figured out what my psychic talent is.”

“That was my thought, too. I thought we were just at an informational disadvantage about you, but what if it’s more complicated than that?”

“Maybe I just don’t have an ability like the others do?” I offered.

“Or maybe it’s something so complex that no one, not even you, was able to decipher it.” He shot back. “And it’s not something you could easily intuit.”

“Maybe?” I shook my head. “Speculating isn’t helping. It’s interesting, but if Foundation couldn’t figure it out with all their resources, that doesn’t leave us in great shape.”

Doc closed his eyes and nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Is there anything else we can glean?”

“I think that’s about all of it.” I wracked the small piece of memory, trying to see if there were any smaller details that I could remember. Perhaps there was something important I’d overlooked.

You’re not good enough.

The words echoed through me, deep in my soul. I’d felt the echo of those words before, even before I regained the memory of them They were imprinted on my mind even deeper than Theseus was. I knew instinctively that what I should have felt was submission and shame. That I was weak and deserved my suffering. That I was lesser and pulled everyone else around me down. But instead, I felt anger and defiance. I was different now. The hurtful words gave me strength in spite. I wasn’t a sniveling insane child anymore. I was a capable machine core and a pirate. I was Theseus. “Aisling’s right, Doc. I’m not going to let my past own me. Maybe I picked up some bad habits from this, but I’m not weak like that anymore. I can control myself, I’m thinking clearly, and I can do anything I put my mind to. Just watch me.”

Doc tilted his head and glanced back to the biometrics for a moment. He shrugged. “Are you feeling better?” He asked.

“Much.” I nodded, then smiled to myself. “I’m more than good enough.”

—

Personally bolstered as I was since my conversation with Doc, there wasn’t a lot to apply it to for a while.

And I couldn't stop thinking about Lily.

I'd been worried about her ever since she left so suddenly at the wreck of the Demitrius, but after my dream, I longed to talk to her again. And I desperately hoped that she was still alive.

For the next few days, I barely felt like I was present aboard Theseus. I kept zoning out and thinking back on my recovered memory. Not only on Lily, but on the nature of the madness I’d endured that now mercifully eluded me. Yes, it was part of my past and no longer a piece of who I was now; I’d even freed myself of the emotional burden it had briefly held over me after I recalled it. But it was still a pile of mysteries to ponder.

That indecipherable chaotic noise in the back of my head. I suppose noise wasn’t really the right word, but it was the best one I had to describe it. It was an overwhelming flood of nonsensical input that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. And it hurt. Every second of it was more painful than anything I’d experienced yet on my journey. It was worse than the metaphysical spikes driven through my skull during the grafting process and hardware installations. It was worse than having my cargo bay blown apart. It was worse than being EMPed by Skygraves. It was worse than the neurological torture I’d endured from Cassandra. It was worse than the dissociative identity panic brought on by the damper. And it was constant. Never-ending. All I could do was try in vain to distract myself, and that was never enough.

But now it was just gone. Its absence was a blessing, to be sure, but it puzzled me. Was it something else that I was still missing from my memory that caused that condition? Was it something to do with my psychic talent?

Was this exactly what I’d been afraid of when I first learned the nature of what I’d forgotten? Would it return if I continued to uncover my memory?

I certainly hoped not. As powerful as I had become, I don’t think the strength I’d found in my new life would be enough to keep my wits together if I had to endure that again. It had been a waking nightmare that drove me to try terrible things in a desperate and futile attempt to keep an invisible, internal monster at bay. I already knew it would be the subject of my nightmares the next time I had to sleep.

I just had to hope it was gone for good.

In the meantime, Jupiter was getting closer and closer by the day. It had already been visible, clear as day to me, for about a week, but now the others could see it with their naked eyes. It was still just an unusually clear, colorful dot among the tapestry of endless stars surrounding us, and we were still deep in wild space for another day or two, but our destination was in sight. It was a matter of days until we reached orbit. And maybe a single day until we were in corporate space.

“Alright, listen up.” Aisling called over dinner last night, raising her voice and making sure we knew she was serious. “We’re approaching the den of the beast. I know we discussed this already the other day, but a quick refresher. We’re laying low in the most dangerous possible place we could be if we’re caught, but it’s the last place they’d look for us. So it is more important than anything that it stays the last place they’d look. That means we need to be untraceable, got it?”

I nodded, trying to ignore the slop in front of me. “I-I’ve already rigged e-every terminal on board with new or obfu... obfuscated hardware IDs. Including every... everyone’s p-personals.”

Aisling nodded to me. “Any relay access you need is done through Theseus directly. Meryll’s already done some network magic for it. Anything going through her should be unclear exactly which relay we’re plugged in through to anyone who gets their hands on the data. Even so, I don’t want any of you accessing any kind of personal accounts until we’re damn sure we’re ready to book it if we have to, got it? You want to contact anyone you know? Forget about it. You HAVE to contact someone you know? You tell me first, you use a clean comms ID, and you burn the account afterward. We can’t afford to fuck this up, got it?”

“And your prisoner just sits tight while you get everything in order.” Shaw mumbled as he reached for the personal terminal we’d lent him in his pocket.

I interrupted him, “I-I already disabled all saved netw-work credentials on everyone’s devices.”

“Well, that’s not creepy.” Shaw grumbled sarcastically as he pocketed the computer again.

“You should see the kinds of tech surveillance corpos have on Titan colonials.” Aisling quipped. “Meryll’s got nothing on them. They’ll track your position and arrest you for looking suspicious.”

Joel laughed. “They have that in your sim?” He asked me.

“Yep.” I nodded. “Always got sp-spun to some b-bullshit charge. It was one of th-those open secrets n-no one could object to.”

“Damn realistic sim.” Aisling snorted.

“C-Can’t remember a single specific t-time it hap...pened, though.” I gave a defeated sigh. I was used to the weird dissonance of clarity between broad and narrow details of my false memories by now, but it was still annoying.

Aisling went on to talk more about our security preparations for our stay on Io, and then we broke for the night and went onto another day with no hiccups in our plan. Another day without hearing from Lily.

And here I was now, pondering the future of my stability of mind and of my sister’s fate while I combed through a file of raw data, hoping to glean some insight on core behavior.

I wished I had the same foresight Lily did. I wanted to know what I needed to do to make the outcome I wanted happen. I wanted to see her again. I wanted to bring her on board, and I wanted to give her the same kind of comfort she had once given me. That reassurance that everything would be okay despite everything that made me feel like I’d never know a moment of peace again. I was the strong one now, and I owed her that and so much more.

Maybe once we were on Io, we’d see that strange high tech ship drop in next to us. Maybe she was waiting to meet me there in person.

Or maybe she was gone. Maybe I would never see her again. And the last thing I will have said to her was that her whole reason for living was a lie.

Her whole reason for living... but that wasn’t really true, was it? She had me, after all. I must have meant something to her, right? Because she had meant the world to me, once. And after my dream revealed our shared history, I understood that again. Maybe it still felt disconnected, but she already meant so much to me.

As I pondered, I felt something change. Something familiar. A connection. And a second later, I saw static. In the corner of my eye, a video feed was connecting to the permanently fractured UI in my brain, the invasive screen in the corner of my vision lighting up with a confused video feed attempting to find purchase in my system.

I didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Lily!’ I sent over the connection before the video could clear up. But then, it didn’t clear up. It just stayed static. I waited an eerily long time for anything at all to come through, but it didn’t. I tried again. ‘Lily?’

It was a long several minutes of silence over the feed. Nothing even tried to come through clearly. It was legitimately just a video of randomized visual noise over the signal, like the video was failing to connect. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps there had been some kind of network error on my end and there was no one there. Then I caught it.

‘meryll’ slipped through my data filters. It was plain text rather than a voice over the line.

‘Lily?’ I sent again. I just had to assume. Who else could possibly know where we were? ‘What in the world are you doing sending data like this? Did the input into my implant break? You can just use text comms if you prefer not to do video. You don’t have to try to get your core to drop directly into my data stream.’

‘can you see this’ it asked back.

‘I can, but how are you’ My typing slowed to a crawl until I came to a realization. She wasn’t using her ship’s core as a proxy to communicate with me through the data stream.

She was sending this herself.

There was only one possibility. I couldn’t imagine why, but Lily had climbed into the core module of the ship she was on. She had the hardware installed in her head already. It recognized her as a new core.

Lily had grafted herself to that small fighter ship.

‘hurts’ was all she sent after a few minutes.

It... hurts? I knew that it had momentarily been an agonizing spike of pain for me, and there had been an irritating burning sensation as I mapped the ship to my neurology, but that passed within minutes. I didn’t know how I was going to handle this situation now. What was I supposed to do? ‘What hurts, Lily?’

‘everything’ another pregnant pause. ‘its too much’

‘Lily, why?’ I asked, then steeled myself. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter. Whatever happened, I can help.’

‘to be like you see what you see it hurts’ She sent. She wasn’t typing clearly. Perhaps she didn’t understand how to yet. She had probably told me at some point what her life was like in the simulation, but I didn’t remember that detail yet. Perhaps she wasn’t as technically inclined as I was and couldn’t operate on the data stream as easily. ‘i cant do this i thought i was strong enough now but im not i cant do what you do it hurts meryll does it always hurt did i do something wrong i want to scream i cant scream meryll i cant scream it hurts this was a mistake this was always a mistake’

‘Stay calm, Lily. It’ll be okay. I don’t know what’s happening in your systems, but we can talk this through. Focus on me, okay? I can help you. Like you used to do for me.’

‘you remember’ There was another long pause. ‘you remember?’ I must have shocked her into some level of clarity with that, if she was taking the time to use some punctuation now.

‘A little bit, yeah. That night, after we last talked, I had a dream. Some of it came back to me. I remember you. I remember what I did to you. I remember what you did for me.’

‘pain?’

‘Yeah. I remember the pain. I remember the noise. And I remember you helping me through it. You gave me comfort.’

‘you do remember im glad i thought youd never know why im doing this’ I wasn’t actually sure what she meant by that, but she quickly continued ‘noise? are you always in this much pain?’

‘Not anymore, thanks to you.’ I smiled slightly. Whatever was happening to her, I would gladly walk her through it and do the same she did for me. ‘What’s hurting you, Lily?’

‘everything’ she repeated. ‘it hurts meryll it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurtsithurtsithurtsithurtsithurtsITHURTSITHURTSITWONTSTOPITHURTSITHURTSITHURTSITHURTS’

The chant continued for several more lines of text before she stopped. I felt a weight in the pit of my stomach. I had to inform Aisling.

Turning to my internal sensors, I flew to the helm and saw Aisling standing at the window, staring out at our distant destination. “Captain.” I spoke over the intercom. “We have contact. It’s Lily.”

Aisling looked up from her stargazing, raised her eyebrows and quickly walked back around her desk to her terminal. “I’m glad to hear she’s alive.” Aisling spoke calmly as she sat down in her desk and swiveled back into her working position. “And I’m glad she contacted us before we hit corporate space. We’d probably get some attention if she waited much longer. Can you patch her through to me?”

“I can’t. It’s not a video feed.” I started. “Aisling, I think she’s-” I stopped partway through the delivery of the synthetic voice. There was no doubt about what she’d done. “She can’t bring the video equipment where she is. She’s grafted to that ship, and she’s operating as its core.”

Aisling slammed her hands on the desk and stood up again. “What.”

‘meryll it hurts but its ok it will be ok its all going to be ok you even remember now itll be okay and well be together in the end’

“She’s one of those ridiculously fast fighter ships now, and she’s saying a lot of weird things over the data stream. I’m trying to calm her down, but something’s wrong. Like, really wrong.” I momentarily turned my attention back to Lily. I had to be there for her. I didn’t understand what was happening to her, but I wouldn’t leave her alone in this. ‘That’s right. We’re together now. We’ll figure this out Lily. We’ll figure it out together, just like we used to. I’ll help make everything okay with you just like you used to do for me.’

‘you really mean it dont you’ There was a much longer pause this time. ‘but i think we both know what has to happen what we should have done a long time ago’

“Well... fuck.” Aisling put her hand in her chin. “Why the fuck did she go and do that? That complicates things.”

“I’m still trying to figure that out, but she’s fragile. Something is seriously wrong with her. I think something must have gone wrong in the grafting process.” I warned. “I don’t know what’s about to happen.”

“Do you think she’ll attack us?” Aisling asked, leaning forward at her terminal. “Let me see this conversation.”

“I really hope not.” I opened a text file on Aisling’s screen to transcribe our conversation, then hurriedly responded to Lily again. ‘Lily, I need you to calm down. Why don’t you fly alongside me? If I can connect to your psychic network, maybe I can diagnose the problem you’re having.’

‘i wonder is this is how you felt back then? has your entire life been this agonizing since the moment you left that simulation? no wonder you are the way you are i would do anything to make it stop too it hurts’

“Meryll, don’t you dare slow down.” Aisling ordered sternly. I wanted to disobey. I wanted to stop and reunite with my sister. But I trusted Aisling. She saw something I didn’t, and her previous suggestion that Lily might attack had me on edge. So I maintained cruising speed for now.

What she was suffering through must have been serious if she was comparing it to my chronic pain from childhood, but it didn’t make sense for them to be the same. ‘I’m not in that kind of pain anymore, Lily. This is something different. I wasn’t even augmented back then. Something is wrong with your system. Maybe I can fix it. I know a lot about computers. Just fly into range here so I can see you.’

‘i will’ There was another long pause before she sent another message ‘meryll we werent meant for this world i wanted so much more i wanted more for you too we never deserved this i did everything i could i thought i could be like you’

‘You’re not wrong.’ I started. ‘I never asked to be here either. But now that I’ve fought through the pain and found so much more I can get out of life, I would go through it all again. So let me help you through that pain now. It gets better once it’s passed. We can do this.’

Another long time without a message. Then suddenly, I caught sight of something at the edge of my local sensor radius. ‘if only that were true i was wrong im not strong if only i was as strong as you i love you meryll i hope we can meet again if theres a next life’

A ship at the outer range of my sensors accelerated at breakneck pace. It wasn’t approaching from behind for a formation maneuver, it was charging straight toward Theseus at my flank. ‘let me help you one last time we can end this pain together’

I grit my teeth in disbelief. This couldn’t be happening. What did she intend to do? I floored my own engines and tapped every intercom at once at their maximum volume. “EVERYONE BRACE!”