Theseus

I didn't know where I was going, but I had to go somewhere. I had to do something. Everything felt wrong. I had to wonder if this was real. Was any of this real? Was I really on Venus when only weeks ago I was just a corporate worker on the other side of the system? Or at least I thought I had been. It seemed insane when I examined it. Here I was, embroiled at the center of a military conspiracy, and I wasn’t even really a person in it. I was just a thing.

I stopped as I leaned over the railing of the cargo bay. Looking for the first time down onto the crushed and torn machinery just made things feel more surreal. This was me. This was a broken piece of myself. Part of me wanted to book it into the hangar and just go somewhere else, but I didn’t dare leave the safety of my shell. Pierced as it was, it was a sanctuary. But another part of me felt trapped.

“Are you done?” I lifted my head in surprise as I heard Joel impatiently stepping up behind me “Don’t think they were finished with you in there.” He grumbled as he put his hand onto my shoulder.

I scoffed and turned around, pushing him away as hard as I could, which is to say, I got his arm off of me “The fuck do you care for?” I grumbled, failing to hide the fact that I was on the verge of tears. I ignored the painful pressure on my bare feet and the base of my spine as I stepped back down the hall. I had too many emotions swirling around inside of me. I needed some kind of release, and Joel was still following me, though he’d thankfully given up on grabbing me for the moment.

“Meryll, calm down, it’s not that big of a deal.” He spoke all too casually.

Not that big of a deal? NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL!? I WAS HARDWARE! All this time that I’d hoped so hard that I was some kind of weird freak of nature that Foundation just wanted their greedy little hands on, but no, it wasn’t even that, I was a freak of industry! They MADE me. I croaked out in disbelief “I can’t believe you would even say that.”

“Ray’s a Mammon, Mouse has his experimental superarms, you really think we’re gonna treat you different cause of this or something?” he asked impatiently, crossing his arms and staring me down, again grabbing me by both shoulders this time and trying to hold me still.

I really REALLY wanted him to stop touching me. I met his gaze, trying my best to look intimidating, and growled at him “Let. Go.” And he didn’t. I tried to push him away, but he held me tight this time. He was much, much stronger than I was, and while he wasn’t being rough, he was trying to hold me still. “Let go of me! I am not your… your property!”

He just leveled his glare at me as if asking if I was serious. “Meryll, no one said you were. Just calm the fuck down.” he was trying not to shout back, but I could tell he was on the verge of it. “You’re part of the crew, Captain hasn’t cared this far, what makes you think she’ll give a shit if you’re just a clone.”

Just a clone. Like that corpse that I saw the day I arrived on Theseus. The one that my first implants had been ripped from. I replaced her, and I couldn’t help but imagine myself in that box, rushed surgical scars where the neural link and wrist console had been, with Joel standing over it sneering at the next new crewmate.

With a frustrated growl, I shouted back at him “Why are you even here anyway!? No one likes you on this ship! I bet if you were in my position, she WOULD have left you behind!”

That touched something, and his expression of genuine concern turned to a scowl. He suddenly let go of my shoulders in a quick movement that made me flinch like he was about to hit me, but he didn’t. “Fine.” He grumbled, turning away and walking toward the stairs “Wallow in your misery, you psycho.”

I grit my teeth as he spat the last word. I wanted to hit him for that, but getting him to leave the room was more important, so I just seethed until he was gone.

Groaning, I whirled around and took a few deep breaths before I let out a loud roar of frustration at no one in particular. I was sure that it didn’t sound like more than frustrated mewling to those around me, but I didn’t care in the moment. I needed more than that, I needed to do something that made me feel real again. Like I had some kind of control of my own life. Whipping around again, I looked at the nearest wall and slammed my fist straight into it as hard as I could. This was a mistake.

“OW!” I cried out louder than I had roared, holding my hand and inspecting the specks of my own blood on my knuckles. I was so weak and the wall was made of reinforced metal panels. As I turned and backed up against the same wall. The rage that I’d been directing at Joel didn’t have anywhere else to go anymore, and the tears I’d been holding back the entire time welled up to a peak as I sunk down to the floor. Grabbing hold of my legs and hugging myself tight, I began to sob. He wasn’t wrong, was he? I was just a crazy thing, and it was only going to keep getting worse. Did I even have a future ahead of me at all in a life like this?

We were already out of inhabited space to flee through. They were going to catch up to us and my short life of freedom would be over. I would just be Foundation’s experiment again, if I wasn’t killed outright on the spot. I was too dangerous in their eyes. I was a failure after all.

My tears made me close my eyes and I was forced to watch the data stream again, but it made no sense to me. My thoughts were elsewhere, and it just looked like nonsense, flooding my thoughts with digital static. I considered just rushing back into my heart and diving into my core module so I could find some kind of sensory relief, but I didn’t want to face Doc and Fuller again, especially after they likely overheard my altercation with Joel.

“Hey…” I heard a gentle voice call above me. Looking up, I saw Ray looming over me, a look of pity betraying her imposing body of muscle and fur. If I hadn’t gotten to know her so well by then, I would probably have been frightened sitting on the floor next to her. “I heard you crying… and yelling. It was a little hard to miss.” She looked back at her open door right next to the wall that I’d hit “Do you wanna talk about it?”

—

I had seen Ray’s room plenty of times, but I’d never actually physically walked into it with my human body before. Wanting to forget that Joel was still just downstairs, I had silently followed her invitation to enter her domain. Before I knew it, I was sitting on a soft cushion around a small table she’d pulled up between us. I still held my legs tight to my chest, my gaze distant as I sobbed quietly to myself. She finally spoke up as we got comfortable. “This is about more than a shouting match and that bruise on your back, isn’t it?” she asked carefully.

I nodded, having nearly forgotten that I had a small injury already between everything else that just happened. “I…” I started, but couldn’t get the words out, my voice hitching in my throat between the crying. I sniffled and felt snot and tears falling down into my lap, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“It’s okay, just relax. Take your time. We’re safe in port now. We have time.” She said as she reached to the shelf of odds and ends she kept and pulled a device connected to a phial of pale green fluid. I watched through the haze of tear-clouded eyes as she felt around at her own fur-covered thigh. “I hope you don’t mind, I need to take my medication.”

I nodded, sniffling as I watched through clouded vision, curiosity helping momentarily distract me from my own plight. She took a needle-like appendage from the back of the device and plugged it into a specific spot on her thigh, where the green fluid slowly started to push into her. She smiled a little at my stare and as if reading my curiosity, started to explain “Most Mammons inject it into their veins. I’ve got an internal device that distributes it more efficiently. Suppose that technically makes me cybernetically augmented too, huh?” she was trying to empathize with me, I guess.

It dawned on me then that perhaps Ray was exactly who I needed to talk to about this. She wasn’t quite human either. She probably didn’t have any rights in Foundation’s eyes either. She probably had plenty of people who looked down on her as something ‘other’ and inhuman. She probably had people who wanted to control her. But she was the most gentle person I knew anyway. She was ironically probably the most humane of all of us.

I wiped my tears from my eyes and sniffled, managing to find my voice again while I tried to wipe the mixture of fluids off of my hands “How… How do you deal with… you know… not being completely human?” I asked.

Her face grimaced a bit at the question. I had probably struck a nerve, but she must have known that I wasn’t thinking very clearly about my words, and she knew that I didn’t need an argument about semantics in that moment, so she let it go. “In what way? I’ve never known what it’s like to not be a Mammon, so I’m not sure how else I would deal with it than how I always have. Or do you mean how I deal emotionally with the way that others treat me?” she asked, allowing a short pause before she added “This doesn’t actually have anything to do with me, does it?”

I sniffed again. She was too good at reading me “I just learned that… I’m a clone.” I croaked out bitterly, looking down at the device in front of her pumping medication into some kind of hidden reservoir inside of her rather than looking into her eyes “My memories are manufactured and I’m just… a thing that happens to think like a person and…” I sobbed again, my vision being overtaken by tears again as mucus clogged my throat. I leaned over on the table with my elbows, putting my face into my hands.

Ray stayed silent as I spoke, but as soon as I broke down again, I felt her clawed hand rest gently on my shoulder “I see.” Was all she said at first in that tone you would expect from a parent addressing their crying child. I leaned into her arm, not realizing how much I just needed to be in physical contact with someone else in that moment. She was waiting to choose her words carefully though.

Finally, she spoke up again, her voice becoming solemn. “I suppose you and I aren’t that different, are we? Strangers in a world where we’re a novelty. We’re both still human, but at the same time, we’re something different. A lot of people would consider us dangerous. They might even hate us just for what we are.”

I sniffled and sobbed. She was right. I had a grim future ahead of me. She had already experienced all of that ridicule because she couldn’t hide what made her different. I could at least pretend to be a normal human with some unusual cybernetics. Maybe I could be mistaken for an overly enthusiastic hacker. But I wasn’t. I was different just like her. “Nothing feels real right now. I thought I was just a person with an unusual condition. Instead I’m just… an escaped corporate secret. I’m just their property that they’re trying to get back.”

Ray pulled the needle from her thigh and started to put the device away on her shelf again “You’re not though. You’re so much more than that.” She said in a matter-of-fact tone.

I looked up at her curiously, watching through clouded vision as she pulled a bowl down from the shelf onto the table and placed a stick of some sort into it. Producing a lighter, she ignited the tip of the incense and a thin smoke began to fill the room. “Am I just a beast of burden? A half-animal supersoldier who’s reliant on drugs to survive?”

I took a deep breath, starting to smell a sweet comforting scent rising from the smoke “No. No, you’re not.” She was an awesome cook. She was a helpful friend. She was a potent infantry fighter, yes, but she was so much more than that. But I had a better word for her already. “You’re a warrior.”

She gave a small chortle “Yeah… well, you’re not just a clone. You’re a fun person to be around, you’re a hard worker, and you’re resilient. Look at everything you’ve been through with us in the short time we’ve been together, and you’re already playing an invaluable role on this ship, all while you had no idea what you were. So why does knowing have to change anything? Maybe you’re not as conventionally human as you thought you were. You’re still Meryll.”

I wanted to take her words to heart, but there was a part of me that was still too scared. I breathed in deep of that sweet scent that was rising between us and tried to make my body relax. I was still Meryll. And who was Meryll? An IT consultant? A clone among thousands? A ghost in Foundation’s system? One of seven mad psions? A pirate? Theseus?

I swallowed hard, grimacing at the thought. I felt clarity starting to return to me. I was all of these things, and I was also free. For the time being, and hopefully for the foreseeable future, I didn’t have to be any of these things alone. I was Meryll. I was me. And I could decide what that meant.

I gripped the edge of the table hard. The world was going to be against me. It was going to be hard. It was going to be almost impossible. But I had a choice. I could sit down and cower and cry at the overwhelming odds until that future came to be or I could keep doing what I’d already been doing with Theseus and its crew: Keep looking for answers and trying to change things.

“I… I need to fight.” I managed to stammer out and finally looked back up at Ray to see her smiling gently “But I’m so scared.” My composure almost broke again as I admitted how I felt.

“It’s okay to be scared. I admit, I don’t know exactly how your thing with the ship works, but from everything I’ve seen so far, you have a lot of potential. I think we’re all scared, every time we face any kind of adversary. But we push through because we want something better. So what do you want?”

“I just want to stay free.” I sniffled hard, suddenly aware of how much mucus I’d been leaking all over Ray’s furniture, but I had to focus on my words in that moment. “I wanna be Theseus. I wanna keep flying through wild space with you guys, helping people where I can. I want to not have to worry that I’m going to be captured and killed or put away in a box forever where I’ll never feel my ship again…”

“Then you’re right. You need to fight for it.” Ray nodded “And we’ll fight alongside you, because we all know what it’s like to be different and alone.” She reached across the table again, patting me on the head “And you’ll stay free as long as you fight. Promise.”

I nodded slowly, noting how soft her fur felt against my head despite the hard claws gently pressing against me.

“Now. Let’s put on a smile, huh?” she asked “Our journey’s not ending any time soon, and we’ll need to keep our spirits up if we’re going to be fighting fit, yeah?”

I tried to put a smile on my face. I still had my reservations. There was an entire military corporation between me and the freedom I wanted to live for. But I wasn’t theirs anymore. I was my own self. Clone or not, human or not, I belonged here.