Post 47

Episode 2

You wake up in a cargo hold. Kind of. More like a stomach. The bioship around you moves and bends in organic ways that make you nervous. It’s why you specifically built a pure inorganic ship to fly in. All those living juices and noises bother you. Especially the ones coming from this room. It sort of gurgles. The gurgling woke you up. You’re dressed in loose white spacer clothing. Comfortable, wide-legged trousers tied with a string, soft kimono style top. You swing your legs down to dangle off the med bed you’re on and quickly run your hands along your arms and face and open the front of the kimono to look at your chest. Everything is pristine. No burns. There are faint white scars running down your arms, where the molten metal cut tracks in you, but that’s it. You can feel again. Tiny prinpricks of what would be hair are trying to grow in your new skin and they prickle in the cool air flooding from somewhere above you.

Your tongue is back to the right size. You can feel nubs of new-growing teeth in the empty sockets and the pressure against your mouth seems satisfyingly itchy. Your fingernails are black and look like they are about to fall off, but you seem to be mostly together.

You slip down to put your bare feet on the floor and the gurgling starts again. This time, the muscles of the beast that make up this room also start to undulate, as if you’ve triggered some sort of digestion mechanism. But no, it’s a lighting mechanism. The moonglow white ambient lighting changes to a intense sun-gold. Light provided, as you can now see, from large cell-looking structures that seem to move on their own, trapped behind a transparent screen of opaque liquid. It grosses you out, seeing living things trapped in fluid like that and you quickly hurry towards what looks like an exit.

There are no proper doors here. Just a circular, contracted muscle of an exit blocking your way until you are a meter or so in front of it and then you can see a flash of white light along the milky white cartilage-like floor spasm toward the exit and open it. It’s just slightly too small for you and you feel a moment of pity for anyone tall who has to live in this ship.

It leads to a T-junction. To your left, the cartilage swoops upwards in a gentle ramp towards more sun-gold light towards a metal scaffolding that has…things…growing along it. You can see them moving from here. Vines, maybe. Or snakes. Or something worse. You can’t trust anything in a biological ship. Fucking unreliable monstrosities, you think, with a moment of pining for your own clean, dead, mechanical ship that Hoshi blew up for you. Bastard.

To your right, moon-soft white light seems to spiral deeper into the depths of the creature-ship. There are thick cords of muscle along this side of the corridor, bordering the metal scaffold that the cartilage has grown on. You can see contractions happening just beyond the first curve of the corridor and some deep vibration seems to pulse from that direction.

You turn left, towards what you think is the control room of this monster.

And you’re right. It’s a short walk, just a few meters before you can see bands of white matter and bone replacing the metal scaffolding. What you thought were vines or snakes were actually neurons. Dendrites, pale and ghostly, reaching for each other and sparking back and forth, building and rebuilding connections as the control center sends commands. You can see electrical arcs leap from the dendrites and several skitter down the metal-bone skeleton surrounding the cartilage walkway down towards the gravely pulsing you heard before. It’s disconcerting to see another creature’s spine and you quickly look down and try to not think about it too hard.

There is a bony protrusion with feather thin, rib-like structures separating the control room from this corridor, making you push past them to get into the control room. The ship makes something like a sigh at the touch and you wipe your hands on your clothes, even though there isn’t anything to wipe.

Hoshi is at the control center. His hands are buried in the bio-gel that’s needed for organic computing interfaces. Several dendrites are connected directly to the interfaces under his hands and several more seem to be buried in his skull. It makes your stomach churn, but you force yourself to walk forward. Hoshi is absorbed, utterly oblivious to the world. His perfect features are calm, relaxed even, as if he enjoyed piloting this abomination. Bits of black hair seemed to have escaped from the knot he had shoved it into and trickle down his face. From this close, you can see the thin lines where his implants and cosmetic surgery scars hide underneath his jaw and just at the base of his ears. Whoever did the work was good.

With Hoshi not paying attention, you take the liberty to trace those scars with your thumb, turning them closer into the lights so you can see the tiny quicksilver catches of the biomimetic implants. You don’t know what they do. You didn’t even know he had them. But if he’s augmented, it would explain how easily he dealt with your ship problems. And you. Cheater, you think, uncharitably. But you like the way the skin feels under yours and you like the way he smells up close. Like woodsmoke and yerba matte. It occurs to you that for once, Hoshi seems vulnerable. You can do whatever you want .

He’s so still. You can see his pulse beating strong and regular at his carotid. You rest a hand there, your thumb toward the soft place between cartilage rings in his trachea. You know that just a small amount of pressure there, especially if you cut off the carotid on the other side as well, would put him down. You can feel his pulse rate increase. He knows what you’re doing. The thought occurs to you as you can feel the muscles of his chest tighten infinitesimally. You tighten your hand, just to see what he’s going to do. But he doesn’t respond. You can feel the solid, soothing beat of his heart against your palm.

Oh give me a break.

You drop your hand. Even an Outcast has to have some honor left. Killing a man that saved your life? You can’t do it. Things are bad enough. If you become an Oathbreaker as well as an Outcast, they’ll never let you come back home. You know it. Even now, you hold onto the hope that someday you can go home, if you’re clever enough. Smart enough. Special enough. They might take you back. But a cold-blooded killer? You’ll die alone in the dark and no one will remember your name.

You let out a breath in disgust as Hoshi opens his eyes and smiles at you.

“Morning, pet,” he says. “Did you sleep well?”

“No,” you grump. “I hate being in organic ships.” You cross your arms and turn your back on Hoshi to stare out at the navigation display taking up the whole front end of the control room. You can see nothing familiar. No comforting constellations or landmarks that would mean you were still in Terran space.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Next time I save your life, I’ll make sure to do it in a nice mechanical craft so you don’t have to get your hands dirty.” As he talks, he puts his hands on your waist to drag you down onto his lap. They’re covered in gel goop. Now, you are covered in gel goop. You can feel your face contract in disgust.

“Don’t touch me,” you say and push off him, looking for something to clean off your clothes with. There’s nothing in the room but organic materials, a co-pilot chair, and firefighting station. You head over to that and pull on one of the modified Nomex suits to try and wipe some of the goop on it. Hoshi laughs at you and puts his hands back into the interface.

“So sensitive, huh Burke? Don’t worry, I know you mechanical-types have special needs.”

You turn to see him leaning into the ship’s interface, moving something along the red-green slime that served as the information transfer. Dendrites flashed golden around him, carrying messages to the spinal cord and rest of the ship.  The sun-glow changes to moon-white as he stands up and stretches. There was a lot of him to stretch. You’d forgotten how tall he was. “Don’t worry, pet. I put her on autopilot. We’ve got time.”

“Time for what?” you ask suspiciously, taking one step back as he moves toward you. He notices and it elicits a small chuckle out of him.

He opens a compartment in the wall to take out a towel and ostentatiously cleans his hands, nonthreateningly. “Don’t worry, Burke, I told you. I need your technical expertise. Although, if you’re bored…” he gives you a long look that makes you remember things you’d rather not. You can feel your face getting hotter and sternly tell yourself to stop and get a fucking grip. You take another step back. He crosses his arms but keeps looking at you.

“What technical expertise are you looking for?” you say. “You already took my AI. And my tracking software. I don’t have anything else.” You see your ship getting crushed into spaghettified pieces again in your mind’s eye and whatever soft spot you have for Hoshi goes away. “You fucking blew up my ship.”

“Well, I had to get your attention somehow, didn’t I? Not like you would have helped me if you could just leave.”

“Fuck you,” you spit at him.

He sighs. “Yes, I’d really like that, but as I keep trying to explain to you, my love, I need help integrating your mechanical systems.” He waves a hand around his ship. “Shori and I get along excellently, you understand, but she just doesn’t like having an AI in her neurons and I can’t get her to relax. I think it’s just because she doesn’t trust me to do the modifications.” He leans close, as if sharing a secret with you. You can’t decide if he’s being serious or not. “She let a very nice engineer from Jupiter Station put in her medical AI without a problem, but for some reason, she just won’t let me do the mods.”

“So go to Jupiter Station,” you say. “You don’t need me for that. You could have let me die respectably in my own ship instead of…wherever here is.”

Hoshi gives you a melodramatic sigh. “Burke, my heart, are you telling me you’d rather die than help me integrate your software platform? Don’t you nerds all sit around waiting for the day you can prove how smart you are?”

“Maybe,” you say, a little charmed despite yourself and not particularly thrilled with the experience. “This would go a lot better if you hadn’t blown me up to get it, you realize.”

“You’re so sensitive. I get it, I get it. All you inventors are beautiful, unique snowflakes that need to be catered to…I totally understand and appreciate that about you, pet.”

“You blew up my ship, you sociopath. And I’m not your pet.”

Hoshi scowls at you for interrupting his speech, “But your little ship was short range, darling. Not even capable of intergalactic travel. And you weren’t doing anything with that delightful software. And, again, if you had just handed it over when I asked, I wouldn’t have had to blow up your little toy.”

“My ship is not a toy. It’s, ahem, it was my whole life.”

Hoshi obviously doesn’t care and is getting bored trying to appease you. He rolls his eyes. “Yes, yes, whatever. Great. You’re here now, on a lovely deep space explorer ship, with a lovely companion. And now, if we can just get your lovely AI integrated, you and I can go off and have lovely adventures.”

“Why are you trying to convince me of this?”

Hoshi drops the conciliatory act and is obviously frustrated with you. No more flirty looks and no more suave diplomat. “Burke, I saved your life to do this thing. You do this, your debt is paid and you can go back to doing dirty, shit jobs for that piss-hole you call a planet. I don’t care. I’ll drop you off myself, if you want to chain yourself to those people as some kind of intellectual slave, that’s your business.” He comes up to you, very close to fist one hand in your kimono. “I’m not worried about your pathetic life choices. I’m worried about mine. And I have a very important date to keep in the middle of the biggest fucking galaxy our piddly little scouts have managed to find and your AI is the only rudding technology that can get me there. So. Buck up, princess, and get the thing working and we’ll both be happy. Otherwise, I can throw you out of Shori’s asshole right now and let you float in the wind like the goddamn puritanical prick that you seem to want to be.”

You never noticed that his eyes are actually a gray-purple, like midnight clouds covering moonlight. Very pretty. Very intense. Very much in your face right now. You close your hand over his to yank it off your shirt. “Don’t threaten me.”

He smiles to show you those filed teeth again. “Don’t tell me what to do.” But he holds both his hands up peaceably. “Do we understand each other now?”

You let out your breath, a little relieved that he’s over there now and a little pissed that he could intimidate you like that. “Yes,” you say because his calm, focused stare compels you to say something, which annoys you even more. “I’ll do the thing, since you asked so nicely. But keep your fucking hands off me.”

Hoshi ducks his head, finally breaking eye contact and holds his hands up higher. “You got it, pet.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What?”

“Pet.”

“Why?”

“I’m not your pet.”

“Aren’t you though?” He gives you a sweet smile that softens his whole face and makes him look much younger and much more innocent. Which was surely his intention. Annoying. “I mean, I feed you, take care of you, bring you toys, and all you have to do is a couple tricks. Sounds like a pet to me.”

He was right. It pisses you off. “Fuck you.”

“Anytime, pet. Anytime. I’m at your service.”